Backup strategy: complete guide and free template

Backup strategy: how to create a data backup strategy

Guide updated in November 2026. You’ll find what has changed since it was first published in the last section.

With breaches and outages happening more and more often, it’s more important than ever to have a solid backup strategy for your company’s data. And since the coronavirus pandemic led to a massive increase in the number of people working from home, it has become essential to be able to protect data remotely, across several different locations.

This data backup guide will help you if you’re just starting the planning process. Backup plans and procedures are essential in today’s environment.

With this guide, you’ll be able to develop and carry out a successful data backup strategy that meets the specific needs of your business. And if you need a template for backup planning, you’ll find one below, in the “Backup strategy template” section.

Why is a data backup strategy important for businesses?

Backups protect data from many risks, including hardware failures, human error, cyberattacks, data corruption and natural disasters. It’s important to protect data from every potential problem, so that an organization isn’t caught off guard when something happens. A proper data backup platform lets the user go back to the last known good point in time, before the problem occurred. Ideally, the backup should lead to a quick recovery of at least the mission-critical data.

The 3-2-1 backup rule is a solid backup strategy to follow. Under this concept, an organization keeps three copies of its data, stored on at least two different types of media, with one copy sent off site. In a remote work environment, cloud backup is a valuable off-site resource. Remote work is especially risky from a data protection standpoint, because cybersecurity on a home network is probably not as strong, and users may be working on less secure personal devices. The organization can centrally back up remote users’ data to the cloud. Off-site backups, which might go to tape cartridges, are also important for protecting against a natural disaster or a cyberattack that takes down a data center.

The 3-2-1 backup rule: what is it and what are the alternatives?

What should a backup plan include?

First of all, it’s important to make sure you have a plan for your data backup strategy, because many organizations don’t. The plan provides a starting point for backup and recovery activities.

One of the first steps in creating a backup strategy is to carry out a risk assessment and a business impact analysis. The risk assessment identifies problems that could harm an organization’s ability to operate. The business impact analysis determines the potential effects of a disruption to the organization’s operations. These assessments are essential for disaster recovery plans, but they can also give the backup plan valuable information about what needs to be backed up and how often.

The scope of the backup plan sets these parameters: the data the organization needs to back up and how often backups run. Some data may not need a backup at all, while mission-critical data may require continuous data protection. It’s important to document this information, because without it the organization risks ending up with large, unwieldy backup sets. The organization should strive to make backup management as easy as possible, so that recovery is a reliable process.

The plan details the organization’s data backup process: for example, who is involved, which programs and products are used, and where the backups are stored. It includes the procedure for testing, reviewing and updating the process. The plan should also state the cost of the backup strategy, but make sure you update this section often, because prices and workloads change frequently.

Evaluate your options: hardware vs. software vs. cloud

The data backup market is large and constantly evolving. As a result, organizations have a wide variety of options. To start, your organization needs to decide whether it will use hardware, software, the cloud or a combination.

Some data protection vendors make only software. For example, Veeam sells backup and replication software and partners with several hardware vendors; it also offers cloud-based products.

Backup hardware usually means a disk-based appliance. In a typical setup, that storage device has built-in software that manages the backup data. The hardware is a storage target for the copies of data. It sits in a data center, whether that’s the organization’s headquarters, a remote site or both.

Software and the cloud don’t require a data center. That makes them easier to troubleshoot, which is especially useful when employees have to work remotely. Cloud backup is simpler to get up and running and to maintain than on-site backup. In fact, organizations that want a hands-off approach can choose a cloud backup service that leaves administration to the provider.

Managed cloud: tell me more →

Storage options

Backup storage options include disk, tape and the cloud. Each has its pros and cons. As the 3-2-1 backup rule shows, using a mix of media types is smart.

Disk backup is usually among the most expensive options, but it’s also fast. Because it sits physically in an office, it can be damaged in a natural disaster.

Cloud backups are cheaper, but only up to a point, because the cost depends on how much data your organization protects. The cloud gets expensive over time and as volumes grow. Depending on bandwidth and volume, it can also take a long time to get data out of the cloud compared with an option such as disk.

Although tape is used more often for archiving today, it’s still a backup option. Its advantages include security: tape is inherently offline, so it’s safe from cyberattacks. The latest tapes store a large volume of data: as of 2026, the LTO-10 generation holds 40 TB per cartridge, or up to 100 TB compressed. In 2021, when we wrote this guide, LTO-8 held 30 TB compressed. Tapes require maintenance and management to make sure they stay safe and secure. Tape speed has improved over the years, but disk is usually faster for recovery.

Choose a vendor/platform

The backup market has a wide range of vendors, from companies that have been in the field for decades to startups specializing in cloud backup. The market also includes vendors that offer a variety of other products, not just backup-focused offerings.

RezolvIT recommends a backup solution that can be used for on-site, cloud or hybrid backup, with the advantage of being fully managed remotely: Backup as a Service.

Contact us for more details.

SaaS backup: 5 reasons you need it

Backup vendors that have made their mark over the last five to 15 years include Veeam, Rubrik and Cohesity. Veeam was originally a pioneer in backup for virtual workloads, but it has since expanded into physical and cloud protection and become an overall market leader. Rubrik and Cohesity led a movement toward converged secondary storage, which combines several data protection and data reuse elements in a single platform. The market has also consolidated since 2021: in December 2024, Cohesity took over Veritas’s data protection business.

As the cloud has taken off in recent years, cloud backup vendors have seized the opportunity. They include Acronis, Arcserve, Asigra, Druva and Spanning.

Other vendors are making a conscious effort to combine backup and cybersecurity. For example, Acronis started out focusing on backup but now offers what it calls “cyber protection,” while Carbonite, the cloud backup pioneer, acquired the cybersecurity vendor Webroot before being acquired itself by OpenText.

Backup as a Service: tell me more →

Implementation

Once you have your plan and products in place, it’s time to implement your data backup strategy.

Look to your data backup policy – a key piece of the backup plan – for guidance. A backup strategy sets out how backups are scheduled, performed and authenticated. It includes specific activities to make sure your data is stored safely and securely.

There are several types of backup, and you should choose based on your backup schedule. Here are some of the most popular options:

• a full backup is just that – a copy of the entire system;
• an incremental backup copies all files that have changed since the previous backup;
• a differential backup copies all files that have changed since the last full backup.

Scheduling is essential to copying the right amount of data for your organization. A sample schedule has a full backup every week or every two weeks, with incremental backups every day in between. You probably don’t need a full backup every day, because not all data is critical, and the space and cost of such a strategy would be very high.

Develop a recovery plan

A backup is only as good as your ability to restore from it. That’s why your organization also needs a recovery plan. A good recovery plan should do several things:

• Set out how the organization intends to restore the backed-up data. Data restore techniques include instant recovery, replication, continuous data protection and restoring from traditional backups.
• Describe how quickly the organization needs to recover data, and how much of it, in order to operate. These parameters are the recovery time objective and the recovery point objective. It’s important to be honest about them: organizations need to look carefully at which data they need in a recovery situation and how quickly they can get it. As such, it’s probably not realistic to say your organization needs all its data recovered immediately. A phased recovery plan is more practical.
• Backup and recovery planning should align with your organization’s overall disaster recovery (DR) plan. The goal of DR is to get a business back up and running after a disaster. The DR plan incorporates the results of a risk assessment and a business impact analysis.

Educating employees to understand the backup strategy

Employee education is essential to help staff understand a data backup strategy and what to expect in a recovery situation.

The coronavirus pandemic led to many layoffs and reorganizations. As a result, some general IT administrators ended up handling backup tasks they had never done before. One way to get up to speed on an organization’s backup process is to read the relevant documentation, if it exists. This shows once again how important it is to have a documented data backup plan that is kept up to date, because it helps a new employee start with more than a blank slate. To get ahead of potential problems, your organization should designate other employees who can take over backup management if the primary backup administrator isn’t available.

IT staff who manage backups have an important job these days. Data sets are growing exponentially, and so are backup data sets. Dealing with all of this can seem overwhelming, but there are ways to ease the problem. Administrators should check the organization’s backup retention requirements, review the backup architecture and how well it works, and create data lifecycle management policies for backups.

Testing and review

You’ve probably heard it before: test, test, test, test. How can you know whether your backups are good without testing them?

Testing doesn’t have to be overwhelming, but it does have to be consistent. The key steps are documenting a test plan, automating tests and checking the accuracy of restored data. Backups can fail, but it’s better for them to fail in a test than in a live recovery situation.

How often you test your backups should match how often you back up the data. Critical data, for example, will be copied most often, so those backups should be tested most often. You may have done this in another part of the data backup process, but make sure you assign each backup set a criticality value, which will help determine how often it gets tested.

A test is an important step, but it isn’t the only one in the review process. It’s essential to analyze the test results and see where your organization needs to make changes. You may also find that bringing in an outside agency to audit your backups gives you an even more detailed picture of how effective they are.

After all the reviews, update your plan. A data backup plan shouldn’t sit on a shelf or linger on a computer: it’s a living document that needs continuous updating. Make sure your backups are secure; you should feel confident that they can handle any recovery situation.

Backup strategy template

At the most basic level, a data backup plan specifies the overall backup process, what gets backed up, which technologies and storage resources are used, what happens if data isn’t backed up successfully, plus other elements such as testing the backup procedures and reviewing and updating the plan.

The accompanying backup plan template includes the following components. Use them to update an existing plan or to build your own plan from the different elements of the template.

1. Revision management. Keep a page that lists your revision activities.
2. Purpose and scope. Provide details about the plan, along with assumptions, team descriptions and other background information.
3. Backup policy. State the company’s policy on data backups.
4. Performing data backups. This section defines the backup activities to be carried out and serves as a starting point for developing daily, weekly and monthly backup schedules.
5. Data recovery. Notes that a data recovery process is also needed to complement the data backup plan; this can be a standalone data recovery plan or part of the overall backup plan.
6. Plan review and maintenance. Describes the process for reviewing and maintaining the plan; it can also specify the need to test the data backup plan.
7. Appendixes. Detailed appendixes sit at the end of the backup plan template; they include lists and contact details for all teams, vendors and backup locations, lists of resources to be backed up and other relevant information. It’s important to keep this information up to date.

The table to fill in for each system

For section 4, “Performing data backups,” copy the table below into a document and fill in one row for each of the company’s systems. The first row is an example.

What we back up	How often	Where the copies are kept	How long we keep them	Maximum restore time	Who is responsible	Last restore test
File server (example)	incremental daily, full weekly	NAS on site, cloud and an offline copy	30 daily and 12 monthly copies	4 hours	the IT administrator	date and result of the test
Accounting and ERP
Email and files in Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace
Employee laptops
Website and databases

Recommendations for developing a data backup strategy

As you work through the backup planning process, there are a number of important steps to follow.

1. The plan development team should meet with the internal technology team, the applications team and the data administrators and set the scope of the backup strategy.
2. Brief IT management on these meetings, so that it is properly informed.
3. Gather all documents relevant to data backup, such as backup schedules, lists of items to be backed up and tape rotation schedules.
4. Identify what management sees as the company’s most important data backup issues; for example, backup speed, meeting recovery point objectives, and outdated copies of databases and other resources.
5. Review the history of past data backup problems and how the company resolved them.
6. Identify what management sees as the most important IT resources to back up, and how often.
7. Determine the maximum time management can accept if backed-up data or systems can’t be recovered quickly.
8. Identify the backup, data archiving and related procedures currently in use.
9. Determine when these procedures were last tested to confirm that they are adequate.
10. Identify vendors’ emergency backup support capabilities: whether they have ever been used, whether they work properly, how much the company pays for these services, the status of the service contract, and whether there is a service level agreement and whether it is used.
11. Compile the results of all previous data backup assessments into a gap analysis report that compares what is being done now with what should be done, with recommendations for reaching the required level of backup capabilities.
12. Ask management to review the report and agree on the recommended actions.
13. Prepare the plans covering data backup, archiving and other data protection activities.
14. Test the backup procedures to confirm that they work and that they meet any specific backup performance metrics.
15. Schedule the next review and audit of the data backup plan.

Important warnings

Make sure you get the support of senior management, so you can reach the plan’s goals. Take the data backup planning process seriously, because it’s an essential business activity. Once the data backup plan is complete, review it with the business units to make sure it meets their backup requirements.

Finally, be flexible. You can adapt the backup plan template in this article as needed to reach your goals.

What has changed in backup strategy since 2021?

What has changed most is the target of attacks: ransomware now tries to find and destroy the backups first, and only then encrypts the data. That’s why, in 2026, a good backup strategy adds a few rules to the ones above:

• The 3-2-1 rule has become 3-2-1-1-0. On top of the three copies, on two types of media, with one off site, you add an offline or immutable copy (one that can’t be changed or deleted for a set period) and zero errors when restores are verified.
• The backup console is protected separately: a dedicated account, multi-factor authentication and access only for those who need it. An attacker who gets hold of the network administrator’s password must not be able to delete the backups as well.
• Data in the cloud needs backup too. Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace store your data, but recovery after an accidental deletion or an attack has time limits. A separate backup of cloud email and files covers these situations.
• For many companies, backup is now a legal obligation. The NIS2 Directive (EU) 2022/2555, transposed into Romanian law by GEO 155/2024 (a government emergency ordinance), requires the entities it covers to take business continuity measures, including backup management and disaster recovery.
• Restore tests are documented. A report on each test, with the date and how long the restore took, shows – during an audit, too – that the plan actually works.

If you want to know how well your company is protected right now, request a free IT audit.

RezolvIT is an IT outsourcing company that routinely and successfully secures and protects its clients’ infrastructure. Whether it’s laptops, desktops, servers or mobile devices, the company adopts and proposes innovative solutions to head off the security threats that may arise.