What are you doing for backups when working from home?

If you have ever experienced ransomware, you’ll know how critical backups can be. Since most office workers are now in a home environment, an essential piece of the IT security stack might be missing from your business’s technology infrastructure.

In this article, we will cover a quick fix that you can deploy to make sure your files are being backed up and outline a permanent fix.

Many small businesses have a backup solution based on the premise that most office workers are in the office. An example might be a cloud backup that offers the ability to transfer the data offsite, so your data will have protection if anything should happen in the office. However, many of these systems rely on workers being in the office for the backup to take place.

I highly recommend you ask your current IT supplier if your desktop, documents, and files that you save locally to your laptop/computer are protected when working from home.

You can use a quick fix if you find you are not sure that your files protected with a backup to use Microsoft’s OneDrive, or the Google alternative known as Google Drive.

Both these systems act very similar to Dropbox. Save your files to the local folder, and the software will automatically take the files, and your backup will be in the cloud.

Our main recommendation is that if you’ve got a lot of data you want to move to one of these folders, make sure you do it last thing at night as your internet bandwidth will be fully utilised as the files upload to the cloud.

Both OneDrive and Google Drive come as part of the subscription to Office365/Gsuite. Other benefits to using this solution include accessing your files from any device with the relevant app installed.

There is also version history as standard on most Office & Google documents which means if you make a mistake or want to review changes, version history can help you manage these edits.

However, a word of warning, this is not a real backup solution. You must manually save the files to the appropriate location on your system.

Not all files will be covered by backed up if your systems fail due to hardware or security issues. Then you may lose important data. That’s where your IT provider should be able to advise.

If you have questions relating to how secure your company data is when working from home, get in touch with us today.