"Ironically, the advice the attackers gave to some paying victims was to back up their encrypted files before attempting to decrypt them with the provided tool. “To avoid losing data,” they said."
This highlights the importance of having a solid data backup plan in the first place. Files should be backed up regularly to storage media that is not always connected to the computer and which can only be accessed after additional authentication. Otherwise, in case of a ransomware infection the backups might get encrypted as well."
"One good piece of news is that researchers from Cisco Systems recently developed a tool that is capable of decrypting files affected by some TeslaCrypt versions without having victims pay a ransom."