Demystifying Backup: One Tweet at a Time

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Last week, two of our Symantec SMB backup experts, Monica Girolami and Amit Walia, joined forces with small business expert Anita Campbell, Editor in Chief of Small Business Trends, for a Twitter chat to educate small business owners on the topic of data backup and recovery.  We know that data backup and recovery can be confusing and complex, so we wanted to give the SMB community a chance to share and discuss best practices for backing up data. 

With more than 175 participants and nearly 1,000 tweets, the hour-long #SMBchat featured lively discussion from a community of passionate SMB professionals.  Here are some of the sample questions tweeted by Anita and the resulting responses, as well as some additional comments and insights:

What types of backup solutions are available today?

• “There’s no one-size-fits-all in backup.  There are 3 potential solutions: software, appliance and cloud/hosted” – Amit Walia (@amit_walia)
• Great blog post on how to determine the right type of backup for your SMB http://bit.ly/zIeIV #SMBchat” – Monica Girolami (@Backup Exec)

What if you have a virtual office or remote workers? What are the options?

• “Cloud backup is your best bet for remote workers.  It’s quick, secure and continuous backup, and reliable recovery” – Monica Girolami (@BackupExec)

What are the security pros/cons of cloud backup versus local backup?

• “Ensure your cloud provider encrypts any data that leaves your business and has an SLA that meets your business needs” – Monica Girolami (@BackupExec)
• “If you’re doing your data backup in the cloud, you’re always protected no matter where you are” – Amit Walia (@amit_walia)
• “Local backups you need to make excuses for; cloud backups are guilt free” – (@craigfifield)

Other comments and insights from participants:

• “Are we educating SMBs enough on the merits of a formal backup plan versus the perils of the status quo (often nothing)?” – (@peter_vasey)
• “Problem with backups is the technology has varied and evolved so much no one is really sure what they should look like now.” – (@ebonstorm)
• “If your biz has closed even one deal  it's time to move beyond the "email to Gmail" data backup ‘plan’” – (@coreydonovan)

Thanks again to all our participants at last week’s chat.  We’d welcome any additional comments or insights and look forward to another future chat with the SMB community soon.

Participants:    

• Amit Walia, Vice President of Product Management, Symantec – @amit_walia
• Monica Girolami, Director of Product Marketing, Symantec – @backupexec
• Anita Campbell, Small Business Trends– @smallbiztrends