Welcome to our September eNewsletter, which includes a timely reminder from Synology’s Jeremie Francois that there are many aspects to a backup strategy, and to ignore any of them could lead to significant troubles down the line. Testing the recovery process seems like an obvious step that every organisation should be making time for on a regular basis, right? But how certain are we that the data being recovered is of good quality? It is crucial to ensure that both the primary storage devices and the backup target can be read, and have integrity checking performed upon them regularly.

Of equal importance is having the right retention policy in place for your data needs - what works for a media production house that generates several petabytes of modified video data every day won’t be the best approach for an insurance company backing up a GB or two of PDF files.

Having the right backup strategy can even help defend against ransomware, as Francois explains: “Having an ambitious retention policy increases the chances for recovery in situations like ransomware attacks. If problems with backup data manifest themselves somewhere in time you can go back until you find error-free data. Importantly, the system can alert you when massive amounts of data are suddenly modified, indicating ransomware may have hit and encrypted your files.”

It can’t be said often enough - keep a close eye on your backups!

David Tyler, Editor
Storage magazine

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