We live in times where most of the data we have is in a digital format. In that format, data is susceptible to damage or loss. Sometimes the data corrupts itself for no apparent reason, other times the hardware where it’s stored fails.

Similar to the old days where data was copied and archived "just in case," we do the same with our digital data now. In these modern times, we move the data around for various reasons, but mostly during data archiving or migrating to a different server. The problem is that most people don’t take the process of data archiving very seriously. They look at it like copy and pasting last year’s vacation pictures from one partition to another one. For the average user, it usually is the case, but companies do things differently. Data archiving or migrating in a company is a process that needs to be carefully planned and thought out. The non-seriousness of the people in charge of that process is the reason why complications arise and data becomes lost.

Today, I am going to talk about a few typical mistakes people usually make during the migration process. It doesn’t matter if you are migrating data or backing it up, the mistakes are similar.

Duration

Depending on the data that the company stores, the archiving process is not something that will be done in a few minutes. Imagine uploading several terabytes of data to a remote server; it can take hours or maybe days. That is why it is important to plan and inform other departments. This process usually happens in the background, but it is not recommended to add new data or change the existing one. Such behavior brings us to the second common mistake.

Leave the Data Alone

Migrating data with multiple people working on it is like trying to save a word document that is being edited by hundreds of people. You’ll never save it with the information you need. That is why it is very important to let the process proceed with no tinkering with the data. It will make sure that everything is transferred correctly with no missing pieces.

Multiple Locations

This mistake often applies to backups, but it is a common one. If you are making backups, be sure to use more than one backup location. Even though servers have redundancies and have their backups, it is always better to be safe than sorry. It is more expensive than just having one backup location, but it is nothing compared to losing your data partially or fully.

Do a Cleanup

Regardless if you are migrating your data or backing it up, there is no reason to do it on everything. For example, if you work with designs and save each change with a different version number, you can have ten draft versions and one final. It is pointless to move those ten draft versions if you have the final one. Doing that will only slow down the data archiving process and can cost more for the storage on the server.

Don’t Be Afraid to Backup

Here I want to talk about two things: backup frequency and backups duration. First, as everyone knows, it is important to back up your data; yes even your holiday photos. The difference between your photos and your company’s documents is that the latter is constantly being updated with new data. Making regular backups ensures that even if there is a loss of data locally, you can get back 99 percent if not 100 percent of the data from a server. That brings us to the number of backups that you should keep.

Most people will say that one backup is enough and that you should write over it. However, they are wrong. Imagine having problems with the data migration in a way that you are left with corrupted data, and your previous backup is removed because you wrote over it. That is the reason why it is recommended to keep at least one more backup so that in situations like this you still have most of your data saved.

Conclusion

As I kept mentioning, the data archiving or backup process is something that should be taken seriously. Don’t jump the gun and start backing up everything. First, see what data needs to be backed up, see how long it would take, inform everybody, try not to overlook anything, and most importantly, don’t rush it. It’s better to wait a few hours than to lose the data.