Every backup system needs 10 design elements to protect your business. Curtis Preston (Mr. Backup) reveals what they are and why you can't skip any of them.
Think you have backups? Think again. Most companies are missing critical elements in their backup system that leave them vulnerable to data loss and ransomware. I've spent decades helping organizations recover from disasters, and I can tell you right now: if your backup system doesn't have these 10 design elements, you're living on borrowed time.
In this episode, Prasanna and I walk through exactly what every backup system needs. We're not talking theory here - these are battle-tested principles that separate systems that work from systems that fail when you need them most.
Here's what we cover:
The 3-2-1-1-0 rule - Three copies, two different media, one offsite, one immutable, zero errors. If your backups don't meet this standard, they're not real backups.
Scheduled automated backups - If you're relying on someone to remember to push a button, you've already failed. Get humans out of the loop.
Recovery testing - No one cares if you can back up. They only care if you can restore. I've seen tape drives that could write but couldn't read. You won't find these problems until you test.
Defined recovery objectives - RPO and RTO aren't just acronyms. They're agreements with your business about what you'll deliver when disaster strikes.
Backup security and isolation - Ransomware is coming for your backups first. Air gaps, immutability, and proper access controls aren't optional anymore.
SaaS backup - Your Office 365 and Google Workspace data isn't backed up by default. I know Microsoft and Google want you to think it is, but it's not.
Documentation and runbooks - When everything's on fire at 2 AM, you don't want to be figuring things out for the first time. Write it down now.
Retention policies - Keep backups long enough to meet compliance and business needs. Legal hold is real, and so are the consequences of deleting data too soon.
Monitoring and alerting - A backup that fails silently is worse than no backup at all. You need to know immediately when something goes wrong.
Endpoint device protection - Your phones and laptops have critical data too. If Steve's phone with all the job site photos gets run over by a truck, can you recover?
I share war stories from my career - the compression feature that looked great but made restores impossibly slow, the backup system that worked perfectly until we tried to restore, and more. These aren't theoretical problems. They're real disasters that happened to real companies.
Whether you're building a new backup system from scratch or evaluating your current one, use this episode as your checklist. Every single one of these elements matters. Skip one, and you're the person explaining to your CEO why you can't restore their data.
Subscribe for more backup and recovery content. And if you want to go deeper, check out my book "Learning Ransomware Response and Recovery" with Dr. Mike Saylor.
While you're here, Here's some great episodes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZGn5xlYTec
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHz5hGZy0nY&t=2s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ov834MWoBXg&t=2s
This YouTube channel is also available as an audio podcast!
https://www.backupwrapup.com
We also have a blog that I've been running for over 20 years!
https://www.backupcentral.com
I've also written five O'Reilly books! My latest:
https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Ransomware-Response-Recovery-Stopping/dp/1098169581/
