Key points
- Ransomware backups let organizations restore encrypted data quickly and recover without paying a ransom.
- Ransomware recovery costs organizations an average of $1.7 million per incident in 2026, even as median ransom payments fall to $769,000.
- Effective ransomware backup solutions rely on automation, redundant storage, fast incremental restores, and encryption to keep data recoverable.
- The 3-2-1-1-0 backup strategy defends against ransomware by keeping three copies of data, two storage types, one offsite copy, one immutable or air gapped copy, and zero untested recovery errors.
- Backups alone don’t stop ransomware, so organizations need to pair them with endpoint protection, patching, access controls, and threat detection for complete ransomware defense.
Anyone whose company has suffered a ransomware attack can tell you that the negative effects are extensive. Ransomware attacks are costly, time-consuming, and damaging to your organization, whether you pay the ransom or not. Losing your data is a complete disaster. The question, then, is a pressing one: How do you get your data back without paying the ransom?
Part of the answer is ransomware backups. Having a working backup solution can protect you from the worst effects of ransomware. A good solution will make recovering your data simple and fast, enabling your organization to get back to business as soon as possible.
Although backups won’t make your data more secure, they can improve your recovery time and lower your costs after a ransomware attack. Prevention and disaster recovery strategies are essential, especially given that the average ransom payment companies make in 2026 is around $769,000, while the average recovery cost $1.7M per attack, and experts predict this will only increase further over the coming years.
What is a ransomware attack?
Ransomware is a type of malware that has infected your computer through a number of vectors, including
- Compromised websites;
- Infected email links or attachments;
- Adware and;
- Phishing emails
Once the malware has been installed, asymmetric encryption is used to lock your files.
When ransomware attacks happen, your encrypted data will remain inaccessible unless you comply with the attacker’s demands. It can be tempting to pay the ransom, but the FBI recommends against doing so, which puts you between a rock and a hard place. While it may be possible to decrypt your data with enough time and the decryption tools, this usually takes too long to be a useful solution for many organizations. However, learning how to detect ransomware attacks can help you recover quickly and minimize downtime.
Backups prepare you for ransomware attacks
Backups do not make your environment less susceptible to malware. Rather, they offer an alternative to paying through the nose for data you may or may not get back, depending on how accommodating your attacker feels. Instead of focusing on getting your data back, solve the ransomware problem by eliminating the malware infection and then downloading your backups.
Modern, resilient backup solutions significantly reduce the operational impact of ransomware by shortening recovery times and limiting data loss. Instead of restoring entire systems from scratch, organizations can use incremental, verified backups to quickly recover only affected data. In practice, this can mean restoring critical systems in hours rather than days or weeks, allowing businesses to resume operations with minimal disruption once the malware has been removed.
As noted in our complete guide to endpoint backup, organizations must have multiple backups of individual devices. Any device that accesses and uses company data must be regularly backed up to ensure that any important information can be restored after a security incident. It’s far better to reformat your hard drive and spend some time downloading your files than to pay an expensive ransom and risk losing the data anyway.
Protect yourself from the effects of ransomware with a backup solution
Anti-virus software, timely patching, and good endpoint management are important for reducing your risk of ransomware attacks, but they’re not enough to ensure a smooth recovery if you do become the victim of an attack. However, ensuring that you regularly back up all endpoints will improve your odds of successful data recovery following an attack.
NinjaOne’s Ransomware Protection Solution combines risk reduction strategies with backup solutions to protect you from disaster. Backup solutions that are effective in preparation for ransomware attacks have a few important features:
- Automation: Automate your server and workstation backups, which ensures that all important data is securely and redundantly stored in the cloud. Automating backups is ideal. Without automation, it’s easy to forget about backing up your data or to skip a few days (or weeks), which could be detrimental to your business operations following an attack. The last thing you need is to lose new customer information or the latest financial documentation.
- Redundancy:It’s important to store multiple copies of your data in various places. A good backup solution will offer cloud storage that distributes multiple copies of your data across multiple servers, but it’s also worth having additional options. Local devices, like hard drives, and backup software are also beneficial.
- Speed:Backups and downloads need to move quickly. An effective backup solution will offer multiple backup options. This allows for greater flexibility, allowing users to choose between longer full backups or only backing up new or recently changed data, which will be a much faster backup process than copying every file every time.
- Flexibility: A good backup solution should offer hybrid or customizable backup plans, and it should encrypt all of your backups to minimize the risk of loss or ransomware infection in the backups themselves.
Protecting backups from ransomware
Although backups are useful aids in retrieving data, they are not immune to ransomware. In certain scenarios, threat actors can also access, encrypt, and ransom an organization’s backup files, preventing recovery of lost data.
Hence, it is also essential to protect backups from ransomware by practicing protocols like the 3-2-1 method:
- Have three copies of backed-up data
- Use two types of storage media
- Store one copy offline or off-site
More advanced backup strategies build on this foundation with approaches like 3-2-1-1-0, which adds an immutable or air-gapped backup copy and emphasizes regular testing to ensure zero backup errors. Features such as immutable backups, zero-trust access controls, isolated recovery environments, identity lockdown, verified restores, and practiced recovery workflows further reduce the risk that attackers can compromise backup data or delay recovery.
Ransomware attack safety and security measures
Ransomware attacks aren’t going anywhere; if anything, they’re becoming more common and more severe. Increasingly, ransomware is used to execute double extortion attacks, in which your data is both encrypted and leaked. Even if you can gain access to your data without the decryption key, under these circumstances, your data could still be leaked. Data leaks can have dire consequences, from stiff fines and business losses to severe reputation damage.
Increasingly, organizations are also using AI-powered ransomware defense to strengthen both prevention and recovery. Machine learning-driven tools can detect abnormal behavior associated with ransomware, trigger automated alerts, and help isolate affected systems before widespread encryption occurs. When combined with secure backups, these capabilities help organizations respond faster and restore clean data with greater confidence.
So, while data recovery is an essential part of data protection measures against ransomware, organizations need to apply additional security controls, including automated activity alerts, access controls, endpoint security, patch management, and threat detection software. You can explore how to build effective alerting and monitoring workflows in our video How to Detect Ransomware: 12 Monitoring & Alerting Opportunities to Automate.
To keep your security environment straightforward and uncluttered, consider implementing a backup solution that is incorporated with the rest of these security measures.
How to choose a ransomware backup solution
With a lot of backup solutions available, it’s not always easy to decide which is the best fit for your organization. Ultimately, the two most important aspects of a backup solution are secure backup storage and, frequent, automated backups that can easily be restored following a ransomware attack or other cybersecurity attack. If you’re not sure which solution most suits your needs, try before you buy. Check out our data backup recovery guide to learn more about how to effectively use backup software for your organization.
NinjaOne Backup enables organizations to store critical business data in immutable cloud storage, allowing for quick data recovery. With NinjaOne, IT teams can ensure business continuity with a ransomware protection software that combines reliable data recovery, effective attack prevention, and monitoring capabilities to cover all bases and give you peace of mind and security. Watch an interactive demo or sign up for a free trial today.
