To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Data Backup – What is it?
The Audio contains an introduction to data backup that is also stated in the text below it.
Backup is the process of creating a copy of the data on your system that you use for recovery in case your original data is lost or corrupted. You can also use backup to recover copies of older files if you have deleted them from your system.
Many businesses and organizations protect their critical data with backup, making it one of the key components of a company’s Disaster Recovery Plan and Business Continuity Strategy.
Have you ever lost a lot of really important data? Or, short of that, have you ever felt a moment of panic where you thought you did?
Whether it’s images of a family vacation, a report from work, or a semester’s worth of homework, you probably have data on your computer’s hard drive or your mobile device that’s not just valuable, it’s too valuable to lose.
Data loss can happen to anyone. Having a backup strategy can help you to avoid the crushing feeling that comes with finding out that all your hard work and treasured memories are gone.
It’s a good idea to make backing up data a part of your cyber hygiene. If you happen to lose your data due to a hardware defect or ransomware attack, having a backup could be the respite you’re looking for.
Data Backup – Why is it important?
Companies and people are very dependent on data. Whereas a person cannot survive without air, water, and food, businesses cannot survive without data. Forty percent of companies that do not have proper backup or disaster recovery plans in place do not survive a disaster.
Every company must designate a Backup Administrator to handle the entire backup strategy, including backup solutions and tools; the backup scope, schedule, and infrastructure; the network and storage, recovery time objectives (RTOs), recovery point objectives (RPOs), etc.
It is extremely important that your company has a backup strategy and solution in place. Otherwise, you can be a statistic.
Let’s face it, you may have a great computer or external hard drive, but one day they’re going to wear out or maybe stolen and you may lose your data. That’s just the nature of any piece of hardware. Your local computer repair person might be able to rescue your data, but then again, maybe not. That’s the gamble you take if you don’t backup your data.
Worse, the Internet harbors many potential threats to your data. Things like viruses and Trojans don’t just steal your data. In some cases, they erase it.
There’s also the threat of ransomware. That’s when a hacker puts a virus on your computer that encrypts your data, making it useless. You may have to pay a ransom in order for the hacker to unencrypt your data, with no guarantee that he or she will do so. If you have a current backup of your data, this is less of a worry. You can just wipe your hard drive and restore it to your latest backup.
How to backup your data
There are a lot of ways to back up your data. Each way has its own procedure. Still, here are some general guidelines when it comes to making a good backup.
Data Backup – What to Back Up?
The Backup Administrator’s primary initial task is to understand, define, and manage what data to back up and protect. To reduce the risk of data loss, you want to back up files and databases, but you also want to back up your operating systems, applications, configuration — everything you can. If you use virtualization, you want to back up your hosts and management console, not just your virtual machines (VMs). If you use a cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), you want to include that in your scope. And, don’t forget mobile devices — your CEO’s tablet could hold critical company data that can be more important than the data stored on some of your servers.
Revisit your backup scope every time you change the infrastructure. New devices, solutions, services all use data. Your mantra is “back up everything, back up often.”
When you choose a backup solution, be sure that it can protect all your data. Otherwise, some data will go unprotected or you may need multiple backup solutions. For example, if you have a physical server in your data center, a solution that only backs up your VMs isn’t enough. Instead, you need to implement multiple, disparate solutions — or better still — use a solution that backs up every device and system in your backup scope.
Data Backup – RPO and RTO
Once you decide on the scope of your backups, the next important decision is how often you need to back up and define a backup schedule. Your colleagues are constantly changing data, and in the event of a disaster, all the data created from the latest backup to the moment of failure will be lost. This period is called the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) — the maximum period that you are willing to lose data on your systems because of an event.
A shorter RPO means losing less data, but it requires more backups, more storage capacity, and more computing and network resources for backup to run. A longer RPO is more affordable, but it means losing more data.
Many small and medium-sized companies usually define an RPO of 24 hours, which means you need to back up daily. With modern backup solutions, you can implement RPOs as short as a few minutes. You can also have tiered RPOs — shorter RPOs for critical systems, and longer RPOs for secondary systems.
Another important variable is recovery time objective (RTO) — how fast you can recover from the moment of a disaster to the moment you return to normal operations. When systems are down, your company loses money and you need to recover fast to minimize losses. However, as with RPO, a shorter RTO requires faster storage, networks, and technologies – so it is more expensive. For many companies, an RTO of few hours is the norm.
Involve your business stakeholders in discussions on system RPOs and RTOs. Once these are defined, you can decide on your solutions and storage.
Click on each of the Backup terms below to read notes about it
Data Backup Solutions
There are multiple types of backup solutions and tools available on the market that deliver different RPOs, RTOs, and handle different scopes. Here are the most popular ones.
Hardware Appliances
These appliances often include storage, which comes as a 19” rack-mounted device that you install and connect to your network. The appliances are easy to install and configure. In most cases, you do not need to provision a separate server, operating system, or install any software. The agents installed on your systems perform the backups, and you access the solution via a graphical interface provided with the appliance.
However, remember that if you have a hardware appliance and it fails, you lose your entire data backup solution. Even if you backed up to a secondary location, you need to re-provision the backup solution before you can recover, which increases your recovery times.
Software Solutions
Software solutions are installed on your own systems and handle the backup process. Many solutions allow you to use existing systems, but some require dedicated servers provisioned just for backup. For these, you need to install and configure the operating system and the backup software. In many cases, you can install the software on a virtual machine (VM).
Compared to hardware appliances, software solutions offer greater flexibility, especially if your infrastructure changes often. Also, software solutions can be less expensive than purchasing a hardware appliance bundle and they also allow you to choose and provision your own storage.
Cloud Services
Numerous vendors offer backup-as-a-service (BaaS) – a cloud-based offering that allows you to provision and run your backups from the vendor’s or service provider’s cloud infrastructure by installing lightweight agents on your machines. The BaaS is even simpler than software because there are no systems to provision and no operating systems to configure.
Of course, if your organization deals with sensitive data or is subject to regulatory requirements, you will need to check if cloud backup with a BaaS solution is acceptable.
Hybrid Data Backup Solutions
The latest innovation in the backup world is all-in-one hybrid backup solution, which gives you the freedom to install the software or use it as a cloud service at will. These solutions combine the best of both worlds, making them the best choice for many organizations.
Backup Storage
A copy of your data is stored in backup storage, and you must have it selected, provisioned, and handy for successful backup (and recovery).
Online backup service is a method of data backup and storage in which a service provider handles the stored data. A backup service can help people and companies manage their data better.
Most services offer encryption and protect the data from loss caused by technological malfunction or cybercrime.
Data Backup to Local or USB Disks
If you have enough capacity on your local disks, you can back up to them or to external USB drives. These backups are fast and convenient and you don’t need a network. The downside of local backups is that if the system is destroyed by fire of flood, your backups can be destroyed as well if they are stored in the same location. Also in many cases, you need to manage these backups on a computer-by-computer basis, which makes it cumbersome for larger environments.
Local and USB disk backups are best for quick backups of a small number of systems and are designed for the recovery of individual files or systems in the event of software failure.
Data Backup to Network Shares and NAS
This is one of the most common storage options. With a centralized NAS (Network Attached Storage), SAN (Storage Area Network), or simple network share, you can store many or all company backups in one place and restore a file, system, or the entire data center in the event of a virus attack or data corruption. Yet as with local disks, NAS and SAN will not help you recover data in the event of a major area disaster, such as a hurricane or typhoon that destroys your entire facility.
Data Backup to Tapes
To recover from a major disaster, you must store a copy of your data in an off-site location, preferably at least 100 miles from your primary data center.
One of traditional ways to do that is to store copies of your data on tape devices and physically ship the tapes to a remote location. Modern tape technologies, such as LTO-7, allow you to store up to 2.5TB of compressed data on a single tape, making them quite efficient if you need to protect large amounts of data.
The downside of a tape backup is lengthy RTOs as you need to physically ship the tape back when you need to recover data. Also, some backup solutions have limited recovery options. For example, you can recover an entire system from tape but not a single file or folder. In addition, you need a tape drive, autoloader, or tape library to create backups and perform recoveries and these devices could be relatively expensive.
Data Backup to Cloud Storage
The modern alternative to tape backup is cloud storage. With this type of solution, you subscribe to a certain storage capacity in the cloud vendor’s or service provider’s data center. You do not need any hardware as you do with tape drives, but you do need an internet connection to send backups to the cloud. Your vendor may have ways to eliminate the problems with uploading large amounts of data by offering physical data shipping or initial seeding program.
Data Backup Storage – Which One is the Best?
Every storage solution has drawbacks. To select the right solution, you need to develop a storage strategy based on your unique business requirements, RPOs, and RTOs. You also need a data backup solution that follows the industry-accepted 3-2-1 backup approach — store your data in three places, on two types of storage, with one copy stored off-site. Great examples of the 3-2-1 strategy are disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) and disk-to-disk-to-cloud (D2D2C) solutions. With these solutions, you back up your data to your central network storage and then copy that same backup to tape or off-site cloud storage.
The best data backup solution is the one that best suits your needs. A lot depends on the kind of data you’re protecting. Cybercriminals can use seemingly unimportant data and patch it together to commit identity theft. A strong backup strategy can make a big difference in your digital life and give you peace of mind.
Here are few things to look for in a backup system.
Summary
Your company’s survival depends on the survival of your company data. To implement a reliable data backup strategy, define your business objectives — the backup scope, RPOs, and RTOs; implement proper solutions; provision the storage or combination of multiple storages; and execute and monitor the backups.
Only then can you be sure that your company can continue to safely operate, even when unforeseen events occur.
FURTHER READING MATERIAL
How to perform a backup assessment
Four Basic Questions to Assess your Backup Software & Process
Students: how to back up your work
The importance of data backup