Backup as a guarantee of protection against ransomware viruses

The effect of encrypting viruses is based on the inattention of users: they themselves launch suspicious programs and open fake documents. Only single antiviruses with special algorithms are able to prevent infection.

Experts recommend to resort to a proven method, namely to duplicate key files and create independent backups. In the company, this technique is called cascading data backup. It protects against virus attacks, as well as accidental or intentional deletion of information by employees. In a critical situation, restoring a single file takes 10 minutes. Introduce a system of backups IT professionals for 1-2 days.

Using cascading backups, a company receives:

• Automatic duplication of the necessary information;

• Reliable and secure data storage;

• Maximum level of protection against viruses, deletion of information, failure and theft of media with files.

How the back up system works

To ensure reliable data storage, you must have backup copies of at least two different physical storage formats that are independent of each other. It is because of the presence of several separate sources for data duplication, the storage system is called cascading or multi-level. If something happens to a single backup, you can always go a step higher and extract information from the backup storage.

Local resources serve as the basic or primary source of information storage: external, internal, and USB hard drives and network drives. Duplicate top-level options external sources, such as Google Drive or Dropbox clouds and an FTP server (a kind of library of files with user access). For additional protection against data deletion, one copy is made available only to the system administrator or company top managers.

Cascading can be based on one of the following scenarios:

1. Backup from all computers on the network is done on the NAS (network storage), and from there on the connected external USB drive. Despite the connection between the sources, they store information independently of each other. That is, in the event of a NAS failure, nothing prevents the use of an external drive.

2. Backups are saved on each user's external hard drive or internal hard drive, and in parallel, information from all computers goes to a common FTP server that is not on the local network. Employees have access to the local repository of their own information, and the system administrator has access to data from all devices on the network.

3. Backups are saved to the cloud with the ability to restore a previous version of the files. This functionality is provided in Dropbox and Google Disk. But in Yandex and Mail.ru to restore the previous version of the file will not work.