Backup Scenario Questionnaire

Your Digital Safety Net: A Backup Planner

Digital life is at the heart of everything we do today. From irreplaceable family photos and essential personal documents to critical work files and business data, the information we create and store is invaluable. While we often think about protecting our physical possessions, it's just as important to proactively secure our digital assets. Data loss from hardware failure, accidental deletion, or cyberattacks can be devastating, but with a solid backup plan, it's a completely preventable disaster.

To help you build this essential defense, we've developed a simple questionnaire. By answering a few quick questions about your specific situation—whether you're at home, working remotely, or running a small business—you can get a personalised set of recommendations tailored to your needs. This tool is built around the industry-standard 3-2-1 backup rule to give you peace of mind that your data is safe and easily recoverable. Your information is too important to leave to chance. Let's get started and create a plan to protect what matters most.

Security Considerations

• Encryption: All data, especially financial and critical information, should be encrypted both in transit (when being uploaded to the cloud) and at rest (while stored locally or in the cloud). For local drives, this can be done using BitLocker or Veracrypt.

• Access Control: For cloud services, ensure that Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is enabled on all accounts. This prevents unauthorised access even if passwords are stolen. Access to local backup devices should also be physically secured.

• Password Hygiene: Use a dedicated password manager and strong, unique passwords for all backup services. Never reuse passwords.

• Ransomware Protection: A proper backup strategy is the primary defense against ransomware. Ensure one copy of your data is air-gapped or immutable, meaning it cannot be altered by malware.

Forward Planning

• Scalability: Consider how your data volume will grow over time. Your chosen solution should be able to scale without requiring a complete overhaul.

• Automation: Manual backups are prone to human error. Automate your backup processes whenever possible to ensure they run consistently and on schedule.

• Disaster Recovery Plan: Backups are just one part of a disaster recovery plan. You should also have a clear process for how to restore your data and systems quickly in the event of a total loss.

• Testing: Backups are only useful if they can be restored. It is an ITSM best practice to regularly test your backups by performing a full or partial restore to verify data integrity and the functionality of your process.