What are you doing for backups when working from home?

If you have ever been hit with ransomware, you'll know how critical backups can be.Since most office workers are now based in a home environment, an essential piece of the IT security stack might be missing from your business's technology infrastructure.In this article, we are going to cover a quick fix that you can deploy to make sure your files are being backed up and outline a permanent fix.Many small businesses have a backup solution which is based on the premise that most office workers are in the office.' This might be a cloud backup which offers the ability to transfer the data offsite, so if anything should happen in the office, your data will be protected.However, many of these systems rely on workers being in the office for the backup to take place.The first question I highly recommend you ask your current IT supplier is if your desktop, documents and files that you save locally to your laptop/computer are being backed up when working from home.A quick fix you can use if you find you are not sure on the answer of your files are not being backed up is to use Microsoft's OneDrive or the Google alternative known as Google Drive.Both these systems act very similar to Dropbox.' Save your files to the local folder, and your data will automatically be backed up to the cloud.Our main recommendation is that if you've got a lot of data you want to move to one of these folders make sure you do it last thing at night as your internet bandwidth will be fully utilised as the files upload to the cloud.Both OneDrive and Google Drive come as part of the subscription to Office365/Gsuite.' Other benefits to using this solution include the ability to access your files from any device with the relevant app installed.There is also version history as standard on most Office & Google documents which means if you make a mistake or want to review changes version history can help you manage these edits.However, a word of warning, this is not a real backup solution.' You have to manually save the files to the appropriate location on your system.Not all files will be covered by backed up if your systems should fail due to hardware or security issues. Then you may lose important data. That's where your IT provider should be able to advise.If you have questions relating to how secure your company data is when working from home, get in touch with us.