Reliable Enterprise Data Backup Solutions and Best Practices

Why should you care enterprise data backup

Compared to individual workstation, an enterprise environment often comes with:

And these also mean more potential risks, such as mishandling, device failures, virus attacks, information leakage, etc. If you lose important data for any of these reasons, the next thing you face is the possibility of both financial and reputation losses. Here are some shocking statistics:

	5.6 billion malware and ransomware attacks took place in 2021. They are estimated to rise by more than 600% plus the factor of worldwide pandemic of COVID-19.
	96% of businesses experienced at least one of the major causes of data loss: human errors, hard drive failures, outages, fire and natural disasters.
	$11,600 is the estimated average downtime cost per minute for businesses. $8,000~$74,000 for small and medium companies, $700,000 for large enterprises.

To prevent these situations, the most reliable way is to choose an effective enterprise data backup solution and build a high-availability, high-performance data protection strategy.

How to choose the best enterprise data backup solutions

There are many backup products on the market, and the Windows operating system itself comes with some backup utilities, such as Windows Backup and Restore. So what are the key points for businesses to pick backup software? Here are some factors you can consider:

Endpoint backup: Regardless of the business size, the ability to backup all computers over network is important. Endpoint backup is just such a concept, referring to storing and copying data from network endpoints, such as laptops, desktops, and servers.

Backup objects: There are many kinds of computer data, but they can be broadly divided into files and operating system. Performing file backup can save your lost data, and system backup can save crashed computer.

Unattended backup: For companies with large volumes of data, it is impractical to manually perform backups every day. So the enterprise data backup software you choose should support customizable scheduled backup so that the tasks can be performed automatically even when unattended.

Backup storage: In addition to internal and external drives, it is also common practice to store backups to cloud or network share (NAS). These storages are less error-prone, larger in capacity, and are more convenient for users on the LAN to view and use together.

Centralized management: With a handy centrazlied backup software, an administrator can manage backups for all computers in company from a central console, which relieves IT burden and reduces manual errors.

Backup scalability: For growing enterprises, the number of business and devices is likely to expand at any time, so the backup solution should also be sufficiently scalable to better handle the growth in data volume.

Enterprise data backup best practices with powerful software

Based on the above criteria, here I present you an endpoint backup software - AOMEI Centralized Backupper. This enterprise data backup solution supports all Windows PCs and Servers on the network. With the centralized console, you don't need to perform the backup on each computer, which greatly saves your time and effort.

It includes complete features to help you with enterprise File Backup, System Backup, Disk Backup, Partition Backup, SQL Server Backup, Basic Sync, Real-Time Sync and Mirror Sync tasks. You can schedule backup jobs for all the client computers and manage the tasks centrally, thus gets you out of repetitive operations and reduce human errors.

Here I will show you the enterprise data backup best practices with this centralized backup software. You can download the 30-day free trial to get started:

Practice 1. Deploy enterprise network backup software for all computers

After installing AOMEI Centralized Backupper on any of your Windows PC or Server as the central console, you can then deploy client program to all the computers you want to back up and gain controls over them. You can also add client computers to different groups and apply different backup schemes.

✍You can also install client program to virtual machines with Windows OS, then control and backup them just as physical machines.

Launch AOMEI Centralized Backupper and go Computer > Uncontrolled Computers > Install client program. You’ll see two options as follows:

• Manual Client Installation: click “Next” and you’ll get the client program setup file. Copy the setup file to client computers, run it as administrator and follow the wizard to install it one by one.

• Remote Client Installation: click “Next” and you’ll have all available computers within LAN. Choose the client computers that you’d like to backup, input username and password of each computer and click “Install All”.

3. If you installed client program manually, the computers will be listed in Computer > Uncontrolled Computers. Tick the computers to be backed up and click Request Control in the bottom right corner to obtain control permissions.

These computers will be listed under Controlled Computers and you can create enterprise data backup centrally.

Practice 2. Set up scheduled backup task with continuous data protection

In order to perform unattended backup job, you need to create an automatic task. Now let's take enterprise file backup as an example.

Navigate to Tasks > New Task and choose the task you want to create. Here click File Backup to get started.

✍You can perform other types of backup as you need. For example, the System Backup in case of system failures and a Disk Backup that can be used to restore the entire computer.

1. Click + Add Computers in Step 1 to select the computers you want to back up.

2. In Step 2, you can Select items based on each client or Select items based on backup rules, then click + Add to specify the data you want to back up.

3. Click on Step 3 and tap Add Storage to add a share or NAS path with required information. After that, you can select a folder in the storage as destination and click OK to confirm it.

✤Before Start Backup, click Schedule create automatic tasks on basis of Once/Daily/Weekly/Monthly. In Advanced tab, you can choose scheduled backup mode as full backup, incremental backup or differential backup.

✤If you are concerned that too much enterprise data will quickly fill up your backup storages, then you can click Scheme to set up a rule to auto delete backups older than x days and therefore save your storage space.

You can follow the process to add multiple backup tasks with different schedules and schemes.

Practice 3. Perform enterprise data recovery flexibly

After a backup task has been created and performed, it is important to consider the issue of data recovery. AOMEI Centralized Backupper centralize all your tasks in a single console, and you, as administrator, can Restore from any task to achieve flexible enterprise data recovery.

• If a backup contains multiple computers, you can choose which computer to restore data from.
• If the backup of a computer includes multiple files & folders, you can choose what items to restore.
• If a task has been executed for multiple times, you can choose which backup point to restore from.

• You can choose Restore to original location or Restore to a new location. By the second option, you can remotely restore the data to another controlled client computer.

• If your backup include OS (System Backup or Disk Backup), you can also restore the backup image to another computer with Universal Restore option. This will resolve the boot problem between dissmilar hardware.

Practice 4. Manage all enterprise backup tasks centrally

AOMEI Centralized Backupper enables you to create and manage backup tasks for all desktop PCs, laptops, servers and virtual machines within LAN. After creating backup tasks, these tasks would be listed under the Tasks Tab, and you can manage all backup tasks you have created in this section.

• By clicking Backup on the top-right corner or a task, you can manually perform full, incremental or differential backup right away.
• By clicking Advanced, you can "Edit Backup", "Restore", "Clone Task", "Delete" the task or check "Properties".
• By Edit Backup, you can add computers to perform backup or remove computers from this backup task, or enable "Schedule" if you have not.

Practice 5. Monitor all your enterprise devices

For administrators who are responsible for enterprise data backup, in addition to the performance of the backup & recovery functionality itself, the monitoring of enterprise devices is also critical.

This is because only by knowing the status of all devices can you react quickly when problems occur, minimizing business interruption time and reducing business losses.

With the Monitor module of enterprise backup software, you can monitor the client's network, CPU, memory, disk, and other performance information after the client computers are controlled. You can also set up alerts to provide timely warning of abnormal performance information and analyze its abnormal conditions.

Conclusion

In this article, I introuduced how to pick an effecitve enterprise backup software, and the best practice to perform enterprise data backup efficiently. In addition to the features mentioned above, AOMEI Centralized Backupper offers a customizable plan as well as an unlimited plan to suit different enterprise sizes, so you can choose whatever you want depending on the situation.

Besides this, we also offer an agentless and free virtual machine backup solution for VMware ESXi and Hyper-V. You can simply check and get it.