Backup Best Practices

What You'll Learn

• Apply the 3-2-1 backup rule by maintaining three copies of important data across two storage types with one offsite copy
• Distinguish between cloud sync and cloud backup, understanding why synced files are still vulnerable to ransomware and accidental deletion
• Configure automatic backups to your organization's approved backup service and verify that backups complete successfully
• Recognize backup configurations that leave data vulnerable to ransomware, particularly always-connected backup drives and network-attached storage without versioning
• Test backup restores periodically to confirm that critical files can actually be recovered when needed

Training Steps

1. A Productive Morning

   It's Monday morning at Nexlify Solutions. You are Alice, a project manager working on an important quarterly report that's due this Friday. You've been working on this report for the past three weeks, and it contains crucial data, charts, and analysis that took considerable effort to compile.

2. Working on the Report

   Alice is deep in concentration, making final edits to her quarterly report. The budget spreadsheet contains weeks of meticulous work - financial projections, client data, and detailed analysis that her team has been building. She opens the File Manager and navigates to her documents.

3. The Crash

   Suddenly, without warning, Alice's screen flickers and goes dark. A moment later, the dreaded blue screen appears - her computer has crashed. Alice's heart sinks. She had just saved her work, but something feels terribly wrong.

4. Restarting the Computer

   After waiting for several minutes, Alice realizes the system isn't recovering. She decides to force a restart by holding the power button. She hopes that when the computer comes back on, everything will be back to normal.

5. The Devastating Discovery

   The computer boots back up and everything looks normal. Alice breathes a sigh of relief and immediately opens the File Manager to check on her budget spreadsheet. She finds the file and clicks to open it - but something is very wrong.

6. Seeking Help

   The file is corrupted. Excel cannot open or repair it, and the automatic recovery has failed. Three weeks of meticulous work - financial projections, client data, detailed analysis - may be gone forever. Alice stares at the error in disbelief. The deadline is Friday, and she has no backup copies anywhere. She decides to contact IT Support immediately.

7. Contacting IT Support

   Alice opens the company's internal IT support portal. She needs professional help to attempt data recovery from her crashed computer.

8. Submitting the Support Ticket

   Alice fills out the IT support form, describing her situation - the system crash, the corrupted files, and the urgent deadline.

9. The IT Call

   Shortly after submitting the ticket, Alice's phone rings. It's James from the IT department calling about her support request.

10. A Hard Lesson

    The call ends, and Alice feels a mix of hope and regret. James explained that while they'll try to recover the data, there are no guarantees. He also pointed out that if Alice had regular backups, this situation could have been completely avoided. He asked her to set up a backup using her external SSD while they work on recovery.