Backup: Part 1 — Why it's needed and what counts as a backup

Documents, customer databases, financial statements, website files — a business can’t operate without them. You can lose them for many reasons: accidental deletion, disk failure, ransomware, laptop theft, office fire. Backups protect against these consequences.

Why you need a backup

Backups are necessary for any company, even the smallest, and for every sole proprietor.

• Protection against data loss. This is the main reason: a backup allows you to restore information after a failure, mistake, or attack.
• Business continuity. The faster data are restored, the shorter the downtime. Every hour that a site is down or the customer database is unavailable means lost revenue and reputational damage.
• Legal requirements. Some documents are required by law to be kept for years. For example, primary accounting documents and financial statements must be retained for at least five years after the reporting year (Article 29 of Federal Law No. 402-FZ “On Accounting”). If such documents are stored only electronically, without a backup this requirement is easily violated.

What counts as a backup

A backup is a copy of data that is stored separately from the original and from which the data can be restored.

For a copy to truly provide protection, it must meet four conditions:

1. Separate storage. The copy is kept on a different medium or in a different location and will not be affected by a failure of the original. A copy of files in a neighboring folder on the same disk is not a backup.
2. Ability to restore. A copy is useless if you cannot restore data from it. Restores must be checked regularly.
3. Regularity. Data constantly change, and a month-old copy may be useless. Backups should be performed automatically and on a schedule.
4. Completeness. The backup includes everything necessary to restore operations: not only files, but also databases and settings.

Backup, synchronization, and replication

Backups are often confused with file synchronization (for example, via Yandex Disk or Google Drive) and with database replication.

The Trash and version history in cloud drives allow you to restore individual files, but their retention periods are limited, and ransomware that gains access to a synchronized folder will damage cloud copies as well.

What needs to be backed up

• Website files: pages, templates, images, files uploaded by users.
• Databases: users, orders, products — the core of an online store or CRM.
• Work documents: contracts, spreadsheets, presentations.
• Customer databases: contacts and the history of interactions with clients.
• Server and application settings: configuration files without which the system would have to be reconfigured from scratch.