Echopath Blog
What Should Go? Choosing What Data To Include In Cloud Backup
When you decide to back up your company’s data using the cloud, you start the necessary process of deciding what data to include. Not everything might necessarily need to go. This is a time for you to take stock of important data, and it’s also a chance for you to save money on data storage. Here are a few things to keep in mind when deciding what should go.
What are you legally required to keep?
While you should always be keeping track and securing legal papers in physical locations, you should also consider backing these up electronically. Other necessary documents like these—be it permits or leases—should be kept digitally in the case of fire, theft, or any other kind of harm.
Find trends in your business’ history
Think about the kinds of information that might be helpful for your business to look back on. Years when you experienced a lot of growth, quarters where you took a loss, employee retention—all of these are helpful to know because this information allows you to detect trends and patterns in your business. You’ll be able to connect variables—who was CEO, what effect a natural disaster had on the economy, recessions—to know how to respond to current changes.
While you don’t need to backup every piece of data concerning your company, you should be thinking about what documents and files will help you find these trends.
Are you backing up duplicate files?
We have several versions of several files—and we sometimes have duplicate versions from different computers. When duplicate files go into cloud backup, you spend more on data storage. So take stock of the data you’re submitting to your cloud backup provider to ensure you aren’t giving them duplicate files. Or find a provider who can detect these pieces of duplicate data for you, and deduplicate them.
What data isn’t that necessary?
We generate countless reports and data that, at the time, we believe to be highly important. But just as you take stock of your budget each quarter—finding out what expenses weren’t necessary, how to run a more lean company—you also need to do that with your data to save yourself on storage costs.
What to keep in print
And, finally, remember: it’s important to still keep paper copies of your most important documents. Even if everything is backed up, it gives you the security to know that you have two copies—digital and physical—of your most important data.