New Tool to Create Your Offline Backup to Avoide Being Attacked by Ransomware

[TMroy]

In this day and age, backing up data is a standard practice. But just how secure is your backup? While your company might have a local, onsite backup or automated cloud-based backup system for server failures, deleted files, or other day-to-day needs, you won’t be able to rely on those in the event of a ransomware attack.

If even one device is compromised, ransomware can quickly and quietly infect your entire network without being detected—including your network-connected backups. And once they’re in, hackers won’t just encrypt your data; they could also delete, overwrite, or otherwise sabotage your storage to build their leverage. Unless you pay up, you risk permanent loss to mission-critical data.

To prevent hackers from accessing network backups and increase the chances of data recovery, all organizations should implement a separate, offline backup system.

What’s an offline backup?

An offline backup is a secondary storage space in a secure external location that is completely isolated from the production environment; it’s not connected to any other computers, networks, or internet-enabled devices and is thus “offline”. Once a system becomes accessible from the internet, it’s no longer offline.

The concept of an offline backup is simple: if data can’t be reached remotely, it can’t be corrupted. Without a network connection or direct onsite access, it’s more or less impossible for someone to compromise your information. The only way to transfer data to an offline system is by physically inserting some kind of removable media, like a USB disc, or external hard drive.

Why are offline backups effective?

By now, you might have heard of the 3-2-1 backup rule. Three copies of your data on at least two different storage mediums (i.e. local hardware and cloud), with at least one copy stored offsite or off-premises.

Having an offline backup takes the 3-2-1 rule one step further. It’s not your first line of defence against attack—it’s your last resort. The backup to your backup, so to speak. It supplements your existing storage and provides an extra layer of protection. And if all else fails, it can provide you with a clean, unaffected, albeit slightly outdated, copy of your data to restore your systems without giving into ransom demands.

As a result, offline backups can ensure a safe and speedy recovery not only from cyber events, but from any kind of data crisis, like network outages, equipment failures, theft, or natural disasters. For good measure, your offline backup should include all forms of data stored within your company network, like databases, operating systems, applications, and configurations.

TerraMaster USB Copy--an ideal offline backup tool in TOS 5 now
The brand-new USB Copy not only provides common backup features, in order to realize offline backup and defend against threats from external networks, but TerraMaster engineers have also additionally developed the USB auto-hide feature.

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What is the USB auto-hide feature?
Simply adding a backup to a USB device cannot keep your data from being compromised. As long as the USB is connected to your storage system, if the storage system is compromised, the data stored on the USB device will not be immune. Manually pull out the USB device after backing up the data, and then connect the USB device to the storage device before the next backup, of course, this method can completely isolate your backup from the network environment. However, for most users, this way brings a huge burden.

TerraMaster’s USB auto-hide feature can automatically unmount the USB device after the backup is over, and automatically mount the USB device before the start of the next backup scheduled task, without human intervention, and automatically separate your backup from the system and the network, making your backup Become a real offline backup, completely eliminate external threats.

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Flexible backup strategy
The brand-new USB Copy provides three backup modes: multi-version, mirroring, and incremental to meet various backup needs. In order to improve the utilization of storage space, when using multi-version backup, you can define the max limit of the number of backup versions. Once the max limit is reached, the earliest backup will be automatically deleted to free up storage space.

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Full control of backup progress
Through the status display and log of the USB Copy backup task, you can have full knowledge of the execution progress of the backup task in real-time, for example, the number of files to be backed up, the number completed, the transmission speed, the current backup content, the remaining time, the execution result of the last task, the next The execution time of a task; after enabling the notification, you can realize the start time and completion status of the backup task through email and TOS notification, so that when a backup fails, you can find out the reason in time and increase data security.

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Update your system to TOS 5 immediately and experience an exciting offline backup experience.

[curtis]

Hello,

Thank you for the information and explanations. They are very clear.

[donkyhote]

Thank you for the information provided.