Many businesses copy their critical data to the same USB memory stick or other media without realising that should the copy fail you could find yourself with no backup at all. This puts them at risk for needing data recovery in the future.

It is recommended that you back up your data daily and keep a minimum of 5 sets of backup media. Rotate the backup sets so that on each new backup the oldest previous backup is overwritten. Be aware that if you are only using 1 backup set, which could be a streamer tape, hard disk device, or even a USB stick, when the backup is running, you effectively do not have a backup in the period of time between the backup starting and its completion – you are overwriting an old file with a new file and if for any reason the backup failed the partially written files cannot normally be used.