So, you want to protect your organization from critical data loss. Good instincts. But where do you start? Let's run down some of the key things to keep in mind when designing a data backup and recovery plan. The first thing to figure out is what data you need to backup. In a perfect world, you should only be backing up data that's absolutely necessary for operations and can be found in another source. So, things like e-mails, sales databases, financial spreadsheets, server configurations, and databases, should all be included. But what about the downloads that are in your laptop? Is it really necessary to backup all those cat pictures too? Probably not. Backing up data isn't free. Every additional file you back up takes up little more disc space, increasing the overall costs of your backup solution. Once you've figured out what data you like to back up, you should find out how much total data you currently have. But it's not enough just to think about what your backup storage requirements are right now. Your organization may continue to grow and your backup needs should grow with it. Make sure that you account for future growth and choose a solution as flexible enough to easily accommodate increases in data backups. Data can be backed up either locally to systems on site, or the backup data can be sent upside to remote systems. Both approaches have positives and negatives, and can help reduce different risks. The advantage of onsite backup solutions is that the data is physically very close. This makes accessing the data a lot quicker. You won't need as much outbound bandwidth since you aren't sending the data out of your internal network. If you need to restore data from backups, that should happen pretty quickly since the data is close at hand. But one of the unexpected event is a building fire. Now, the systems we were backing up along with the backup server had been lost in the fire. Yikes. We've lost everything. This is why offsite backups are strongly recommended. This involves making backups of critical data and sending the backup data offsite to remote systems in a different physical location. This could be another backup server that you control in a different office, or a cloud hosted backup service. But there are trade offs. Offsite backups better prepare us for catastrophic events that can wipe out data from an entire office, but sending data offsite means that you need to transmit the data outside of your network. This means you need to consider things like encryption and bandwidth. Your internet connection will be used to transmit the backup data. Depending on how much data you're sending off site and how fast the internet connection is, this could take a lot of time. Another important thing to consider is encryption of backups. Since backups will often contain sensitive and confidential business data, it's important the data is handled securely and stored in a way that prevents unauthorized access. When sending data offsite is especially important to make sure that data is being transmitted securely, preferably encrypted via TNS. But that's not all. The resulting backup data that's stored should also be encrypted at rest. This is just good security practice. In the next video, we will discuss some of the practical tools you can use to backup your data.