Best Practice Backups with BackupAssist

Congratulations. You’ve installed BackupAssist and want to protect your system. This guide makes the process easy by showing you how to create a best practice backup strategy with BackupAssist.

What is best practice?

A best practice backup solution has 3 backup jobs, 1 of which is a bare-metal image, backing up to 3 destinations, with at least 1 offsite. The example below shows backups stored onsite, offsite and in the cloud.

Best Practice Backups

So how does having 3 backups to 3 destinations help? As this table shows, different backups have different strengths, and only layered protection gives you the best solutions to choose from when disaster strikes.

Best practice examples

Best Practice using BackupAssist

The graphic and table show you what a best practice solution can look like, and how it protects you. Now let’s look at how to do this using BackupAssist. Below is a set of BackupAssist backup jobs in order of importance, that map perfectly to best practice. Simply create a solution as outlined below and let BackupAssist do the rest.

  1. Advanced System Protection image backup to a set of rotating USB drives

    2. A System Protection backup to a rotating set of external USB drives creates archived, air-gapped backups for disaster recovery. To learn more, see Advanced System Protection

  2. Cloud Backup to an offsite cloud service provider. (Requires add-on)

    3. A Cloud Backup creates a file backup that you can restore from should your local disk, NAS or USB disk backups fail. This provides an air-gapped location that is offsite. To learn more, see Cloud Backup

  3. File Protection data to a local disk or NAS

    4. A File Protection backup of files and applications to a NAS or local disk provides a backup with hundreds of days of version history, that is easily accessible and ideal for performing quick restores. To learn more, see File Protection

Note: Backups are important, but it’s equally important to test them. We recommend test restores and recoveries be performed on a monthly basis so you can learn and test the restore / recover process and identify any problems. Learn more about restore and recovery.