Backup and disaster recovery is the combination of regularly copying data and having a tested plan to restore systems and operations after a failure, theft, cyber attack or disaster. Backup protects the information, while disaster recovery covers how quickly the business gets working again.
Backups can be stored on local devices, in the cloud or both. A widely used guideline is to keep several copies on different media with at least one stored offsite and one kept offline or immutable so ransomware cannot change it. Two measures guide design. Recovery point objective is how much data loss is tolerable, and recovery time objective is how long the business can be down.
Retail and hospitality businesses depend on sales records, stock data, customer details, menus and configuration files. Cloud-based systems still need attention, because a software provider's responsibility for availability does not always cover your own deleted or corrupted data. Local servers, store back-office computers and on-premise databases usually need their own backup arrangements.
The most common pitfall is never testing restores, which leaves a business discovering failed backups at the worst moment. Others include backing up only some systems, leaving backups connected to the network where malware can reach them, and no written plan describing who does what in an outage. Document recovery steps and review them regularly as systems change.
Reliable backups turn a potentially fatal incident into an inconvenience and are a core defence against ransomware. RetailCare supports backup and recovery planning through its managed IT and cyber security services.