9 Data Backup Best Practices

Backups are one of the best-known data protection strategies—and they’re implemented by most businesses.  

But backups are frequently misunderstood: more than just a technical task or a “nice-to-have,” they’re essential for compliance, resilience, and recovery resilience. Getting them right is the difference between business recovery and catastrophic data loss. 

In this guide, we’ll explore all the essential backup best practices, some of the pitfalls to avoid, as well the business benefits of following the right strategy. 

Key Takeaways: 

1. Data backup best practices are more than just technical tasks—they’re essential risk management strategies that provide proven guidelines protecting against ransomware attacks and system failures.  

2. Core backup strategies include following the 3-2-1-1-0 rule, implementing immutable storage solutions, automating backup processes, creating disaster recovery plans, and regularly testing restore procedures to maintain data integrity.  

3. Avoid critical backup mistakes like storing backups on the same device as original data, relying solely on cloud sync tools, neglecting to test restores, or failing to account for remote endpoints that create security vulnerabilities.  

4. Ransomware-proof and immutable out-of-the-box, Ootbi by Object First ensures recovery with secure, simple, and powerful backup storage for Veeam customers that can be racked, stacked, and powered in 15 minutes while providing unbeatable backup and recovery performance. 

Rethinking Backup: More Than Just Data Copies 

Data backup best practices are proven guidelines and strategies used to ensure backups are secure, reliable, and easy to restore. They cover how often to back up data, where to store it, how to protect it, and how to test the backup process regularly. 

Modern backup strategies are part of broader risk management strategies that are essential to business continuity: according to recent Object First research, outdated backup technology (34%), lack of backup data encryption (31%), and failed data backups (28%) are the top vulnerabilities that lead to successful cyberattacks.  

Backup strategies should be differentiated from backup tactics. While strategies are concerned with long-term protection, aligned with business continuity, tactics concern the tools, schedules, and processes that enable broader strategy. Following data backup best practices does however require both solid backup tactics and strategy.  

9 Best Practices for Data Backup 

1. Use Immutable Backups  

Immutable backups are unalterable and undeletable, offering strong protection against data tampering or loss. They employ an advanced S3 object lock that effectively prevents unintentional or deliberate alterations or deletions for a specified duration.  

Unlike conventional backups that may be susceptible to changes, immutable backups create immutable copies of your valuable data, offering an ironclad defense against accidental or malicious modifications—including cyberattacks like ransomware. 

Creating an immutable copy means placing a digital lock on your data, preventing changes or deletions during a user-defined period. This process involves WORM (Write Once, Read Many) protection, ensuring the data backup remains intact and readable without possible alterations. 

Once this period concludes, the data's immutable protection ceases, allowing for potential updates. This balance between safety and flexibility is crucial, as data requirements and relevance can shift over time, making adaptability a key consideration. 

2. Follow the 3-2-1-1-0 Backup Rule  

The 3-2-1-1-0 Backup Rule is an extension to the original 3-2-1 rule which involves creating three copies of your data, storing them on two different media types, and keeping one copy off-site. 

3-2-1-1-0 introduces two supplementary concepts: 

• 1: Keeping an extra copy offline, logically air-gapped, or in an immutable state to fortify the reliability of your backups and provide an added layer of protection against potential threats.
• 0: Ensuring zero errors on backup, guaranteeing the integrity and reliability of your data copies and instilling confidence in their retention. 

3. Apply Data Backup Frequency Best Practices   

The frequency of backups will differ between every business, but there are some data backup frequency best practices that are common to every organization: 

• Set a Recovery Point Objective (RPO): This is the amount of data loss you consider ‘acceptable’ in case of a system failure or other data loss incident. The less data you’re willing to lose, the more frequent your backups are likely to be.
• Set a Recovery Time Objective (RTO): This is the maximum length of time you consider acceptable before your business restores full functionality after a data loss incident. The quicker you need to recover, the more frequent your backups are likely to be.
• Maintain data “freshness”: Maintaining endless out-of-date backups is expensive and often pointless, because your business will usually only need to restore to your last full backup. Backup your data frequently to keep it “fresh” and to minimize the expense and effort of storing out-of-date backups. 

4. Create a Disaster Recovery Plan   

A disaster recovery plan (DRP) is a detailed, action-driven roadmap for restoring critical systems, data, and operations after a disruptive incident. It outlines exactly what needs to happen, in what order, using which tools, and by whom to bring your business back online fast, safely, and with minimal damage.  

It relies on three key elements: 

1. Preventive measure: the proactive safeguards you put in place to prevent disasters before they happen. 

2. Detective measures: designed to spot trouble early, whether misconfiguration, unauthorized access attempts, or signs of ransomware spreading through your environment. 

3. Corrective measures: steps that bring you back when things go wrong. 

5. Choose the Right Backup Method  

The right type of backup will differ for every business depending on its size and complexity—but the most common today are local, cloud, and hybrid backups:  

• On-premises backups: Make use of external hard drives, Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices, or other devices held locally to ensure rapid access. Local backups cannot be accessed without a physical connection to the device, but they can be vulnerable to theft and physical damage.
• Cloud backups: Utilize cloud storage services to hold data off-site. While cloud backups scale easily and ensure data is accessible from anywhere, they are expensive on a large scale, often provide slower restore speeds, and cannot be accessed without an internet connection.  
• Hybrid backups: Combine both local and cloud to benefit from the advantages of both options—offering the speed and security of local storage with the flexibility of cloud storage. The greatest benefit is redundancy, ensuring data is always available if either cloud or local backups fail.  

6. Automate Your Backups  

Creating backups is resource-intensive. Making use of automation where you can reduce the workload and ensures you deliver an effective, consistent data backup strategy with significantly less input. 

The most common uses of automation in backup strategy include: 

• Scheduled backups: Capture backups at specific time intervals, eliminating the need for manual intervention
• Monitoring and alerts: Track backup processes and send alerts in the event of insufficient storage space, failure, or other issues
• Detection: Flag up any file or data changes within designated files or systems, ensuring the most recent data is captured
• Reporting and audits: Deliver detailed backup reports, including backup status, any potential issues, and success rates
• Testing: Allows you to verify the integrity of your backups and simulate restore processes to ensure your strategies are most effective 

7. Ensure End-to-End Backup Security 

Aside from guaranteeing the security of the backups themselves, there are a few additional key best practices for encrypting backup data to ensure it remains safe throughout its life cycle: 

• Encryption protects data during storage and transit
• Access controls limit who can access backups
• Isolation separates backups from primary systems, either physically or using software, to prevent unauthorized access and malware access
• Endpoint protection encompasses various security tools and strategies that defend individual computing devices—including computers, laptops, and smartphones—against cyberattacks and harmful software. 

8. Test Backup Restores Regularly  

Regularly testing your backups is just as important as backing up frequently. 

Testing backups is crucial because it ensures your data can be successfully recovered in case of a disaster or data loss incident, preventing potential business disruption. Without testing, you risk discovering that your backups are incomplete, corrupt, or unusable when you need them most.  

Tests include: 

• Verifying backup files
• Conducting full and partial restores
• Simulating disaster scenarios
• Monitoring ongoing backup status 

9. Regularly Review and Update Your Backup Policy   

Conducting periodic assessments of your business data backup strategy is essential for maintaining operational resilience and reducing the likelihood of information loss.  

These evaluations confirm that your backup procedures remain functional, current, and compatible with changing organizational requirements and emerging technologies.  

This approach enables rapid and seamless data restoration when facing unexpected interruptions or system failures. 

Avoid These Common Mistakes in Data Backup Strategies 

There are many best practices you should adopt in your backup strategies—but there are also many you should avoid.  

Here are some of the most common mistakes in data backup strategies: 

• Not using immutable backup storage: A lack of an immutable storage solution for your backups allows them to be modified and deleted—at best by accident, at worst by a nefarious bad actor.
• Relying only on cloud sync tools: While cloud sync tools provide convenient file synchronization, they aren't true backup solutions. They lack the necessary security features—including immutability—to keep your data safe, they risk replicating corrupted or deleted files across all devices, and they typically don't maintain the comprehensive version history or granular recovery options needed for enterprise data protection.
• Not testing restores: Many organizations discover their backup files are corrupted, incomplete, or incompatible only when they desperately need them during an actual data loss incident.
• Keeping backups on the same device: Storing backup files on the same system as the original data defeats the purpose of having backups at all. Hardware failures, theft, or ransomware attacks will compromise both the primary data and the backup simultaneously, leaving no recovery options available.
• Not accounting for remote endpoints: Backup strategies often focus on centralized servers while neglecting other devices used in the production and transfer of data. Without the right security protocols, endpoint devices can quickly become a gateway for cyber threats. 

Ootbi: A Crucial Part of Your Data Backup Strategy 

The best data backup strategy is nothing without the right tools. 

Ransomware-proof and immutable out-of-the-box, Ootbi by Object First ensures recovery with secure, simple, and powerful backup storage for Veeam customers that can be racked, stacked, and configured in 15 minutes with no security expertise required. 

Ootbi is built on the latest Zero Trust Data Resilience and data security principles and delivers S3 native immutable object storage designed and optimized for unbeatable Veeam backup and recovery performance.  

Download the white paper and learn why Ootbi is the Best Storage for Veeam. 

Resilience Starts with Good Data Backup Practices 

Data backup best practices are proven strategies ensuring secure, reliable data protection and recovery.  

With the frequency of ransomware attacks continuing to rise, businesses need to match good strategy with the right tools that keep data, and the business, safe.  

Using a secure data backup storage solution that features immutability is the best way to keep your data safe—enabling fast recovery and maintaining business continuity should the worst happen.