3 Strategies for Backing Up Remote Worker Machines

Though many businesses are reopening after shutting down due to COVID-19, companies like Facebook plan to allow some employees to work remotely on a permanent basis. Are you prepared to keep critical data safe for end-users who don’t return to the office? With workers geographically scattered, backups are more important than ever. But the challenge of creating, storing, and recovering them has never been more difficult. Fortunately, your remote backup and disaster recovery (BDR) strategy doesn’t have to be complicated to be effective. Below are three approaches to consider for your organization.

File and Folder Backups

File and folder syncing services like Dropbox, Google Drive, or Microsoft 365 are affordable ways to back up certain kinds of data and once set up they sync automatically. But if a remote employee’s system fails they’ll still need an operating system and various applications to use the files stored on storage services like these. And, while platforms like Microsoft 365 or G Suite by Google give users access to many applications from the cloud, that still might not be enough to keep remote workers productive if they suffer a major hardware failure. Despite its flaws, this approach can be a good balance between affordability and data redundancy for some businesses. Still, it’s wise to back up cloud data to a second location. StorageCraft’s Cloud Backup solution is one way you can back up data stored on platforms like G Suite, Office 365, and Microsoft 365.

Onsite Backups to External Drives

Many backup solutions let you remotely install backup agents on a worker’s machine. From there you can help them schedule full and incremental backups that they can store on an external hard drive. This is a great way to store files and folders along with the entire operating system, applications, and settings. Just be sure users keep their external drives plugged in while they’re working so that new changes are constantly being saved in incremental backups. Onsite backups ensure that there’s a fully recoverable copy of an employee’s system, but it’s not foolproof. If backups are stored in the same location as the original files they could be lost if there’s a disaster like an earthquake, hurricane, or flood. That’s why many businesses go one step further.

Offsite Replication

With StorageCraft’s suite of backup tools you can install agents on a remote worker’s machine, schedule backups, and then replicate them to a second location such as StorageCraft Cloud Services or your own colocation facility. This approach gives you more data redundancy and flexible recovery options. If a remote worker has an issue with their primary hardware you can spin up a recent backup as a virtual machine (VM), so they can access their systems through any web browser.

Conclusion

As you think about your backup and disaster recovery (BDR) strategy, consider whether your current solution can effectively replicate and recover machines no matter where they are. Click here for your custom demo today.