Backups are like insurance, a painful necessity. In a nutshell, how do you do them right and cheap?
Here is what we do and recommend.
Prevention is far less costly than repairs, so you must spend time to figure out what to protect and how to protect it.
Each asset you need to protect has its own backup tool, method and timing: local data, server data, and cloud data (documents and databases), hard disks, virtual machine disk images, but also system states (programs and settings), and boot records.
As passwords change through time, you may not be able to access your resources after you restore them, so your credentials also need to be backed up as they change through time.
Since the software and data saved in PC's and servers have become huge and unwieldy, some of the backups must be held within the machines themselves so that recoveries can be performed quickly. The same backups and older versions must be held remotely for redundancy.
On premises data should be backed up in another location or in the cloud and cloud data should be backed up on premises or in another cloud.
Backups should be automated and incremental so that anything can be recovered predictably in the state in which it was an hour ago, yesterday, in any of the past 12 months or in the past few years. With multi-terabyte drives, this is inexpensive and relatively easy.