The the simplest way to remember how to backup properly is the 3-2-1 rule. 3 copies on at least 2 different types of hardware with 1 off site. If you are able to follow this rule it will keep you in good shape in most circumstances. Though if you have a business, having to deal with unscheduled downtime could cost you a lot of money. So to minimize down time we need to go in a little more depth.

While the 3-2-1 rule will help ensure you do not lose any data, redundancy helps to keep your business up and running while you repair the damage. Depending on your risk tolerance and budget there are many different solutions for keeping things up and running. The simplest of these is called a Mirror. A Mirror setup takes 2 or more storage disks and duplicates the data exactly between them. While this ensures you always have an exact copy it also means that storage space costs double. These can be easily setup and configured using consumer hardware. And since the design is so simple it can also be easy for an inexperienced person to manage. The next level of redundancy allows for more flexability and while it can have a higher up front cost it has better cost per GB ratio than the mirror. This would be a RAID setup, this allows you to split the data between 3 drives allowing you to lose any single drive and still maintain your data. And the more drive you add the better cost per GB becomes, but this also increases your risk of failure. Most designs using RAID will have 3-8 drives and can be configured to deal with 1, 2, or 3 drive failures. This flexability is why many businesses choose this model for their backup needs. Also depending on the design you can improve perfomance quite dramatically. With the complexity of this setup it is really recommended that you get someone knowledgable in this area to help get this setup for your particular business needs Keep in mind even with great redundancy it is not a replacement for the 3-2-1 backup system, just a compliment to it. If you had a great RAID setup with 3 drive redundancy and it gets a power spike, you might loose everything on that system. Make sure you keep backups.

Having the greatest backup plan in the world will not help you if you are not using it regularly, automation will make sure that your data has been backed up on a regular basis. Depending on your needs you can have setups that will keep backups hourly, daily, weekly, etc. Good questions to ask yourself would be, how far would I be set back if I lost my data over the last day, week, hour, and is that acceptible to me? Depending on your answer you may need to scale your backup solution up or down to make sure your business is not severly impacted in the event that you need to restore from backups.

Last thing to consider when setting up your backup solution is power redundancy and protection. If you put a lot into your backup solution and it gets hit by a power surge or simply loses power without warning this could leed to data corruption and loss. A good backup solution needs to have proper protection and power redundancy as well. UPS backups are often a good solution for small setups, all the way up to generators for larger deployments.