Data loss is catastrophic. Studies show 60% of businesses that suffer a major data loss go bankrupt within 6 months. Yet many companies still treat backups as an afterthought. This guide explains how to build a backup strategy that actually works.
The 3-2-1 Rule
Keep 3 copies of critical data, on 2 different media types, with 1 stored offsite. This protects against hardware failure (local copy fails), site disaster like fire or flood (offsite copy survives), and ransomware that encrypts local files (immutable offsite copy is safe).
Cloud Backup Destinations
Hetzner StorageBox offers excellent price/performance in Europe with GDPR compliance. Backblaze B2 is affordable for large volumes. AWS S3 with Object Lock provides immutable storage — ransomware cannot delete locked objects. Always encrypt data before uploading: the provider should never see your plaintext data.
Tools: restic and Borg
Restic is our preferred backup tool for Linux: it supports deduplication, compression, encryption, and can push to S3, SFTP, B2 and local storage. Borg (BorgBackup) excels at space-efficient archives. Both support pruning policies to manage retention automatically.
Recovery Testing
A backup you have never tested is not a backup — it is hope. Conduct quarterly restore drills to a test environment. Measure your RTO (Recovery Time Objective: how fast can you restore?) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective: how much data can you afford to lose?). Document these metrics in your disaster recovery plan.
Database Backups
Logical dumps (mysqldump, pg_dump) are portable but slow for large databases. Binary backups (Percona XtraBackup, pg_basebackup) are faster but require matching versions. Always test restoring your database backup — a corrupt dump discovered during an outage is a crisis.
Conclusion
E24 BALTIC designs and implements backup strategies for businesses across the Baltics — from simple cron-based scripts to enterprise-grade multi-site replication. We also conduct backup audits to verify your current strategy actually protects you.
