It’s March 31st and the WorldBackupDay initiative kindly reminds everyone out there that it’s never too late to make backups (of course before it gets too late).

Check your crons and remote copies, make sure everything is backed up and if you’re feeling so prepared and into shape, take your backups to a test. As WorldBackupDay tells us – backups are often underestimated.

Now if we can give some good cloud server related advice here they are:

Number 1 of course is…

Always make backups of your important data. We got your back and the cloud is highly reserved, but in the end we all work with machines and they do tend to break. As cloud professionals we recommend you to have an off-cloud backup of your most important data. Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket. Always make a second copy to a destination that is as much as possible unrelated to your original storage.

Second rule

Test your backups. Just making a copy of your data without ever checking and testing it’s recoverability and usability can leave you with a very bitter experience. There are plenty of things that could go wrong with a backup, especially if you blindly rely that it works. Test your recovery plan every once in a while.

Last advice is

Think twice about your calculations. Backups can be a complex matter – how often you make them, how long do you keep them and how do split them. People often say “the bigger – the better”, but you really should be careful about that. If you backup and entire drive it will be hard and slow to recover a single file. Keeping a long history of backups may need plenty of space. But if you reduce it and you keep only a month back, this can come insufficient when you realize you need to restore something lost some time ago. Make sure you create contexts in your backups. Separate the configuration from the data. Keep your archives small enough to easily restore them. Refer to rule number 2 and test your plan in various scenarios to make sure you can really recover the data that you might need.

Spread the word today – backups are important!