Your data is one of the top assets your organization has. For that reason, all businesses need to have a comprehensive data backup and recovery system. Here are four important terms you need to know.
Backup Types
First, to plan a solution to meet your company’s needs you need to know how backing up works. Backing up your data is more complicated than just saving a copy of a file. There are four kinds of backup you need to know about so you can plan your backup strategy.
Full backup: This is a backup method that – as the name suggests – is a comprehensive backup of all selected files. That means it can take a while. It can lead to your data temporarily being hard or impossible to access, which can cause disruption and downtime. Full backups are typically done after business hours, when disruption can be minimized.
Differential backup: With this method, only changes made since the last full back up are saved. That makes it significantly faster, but it also means that restoring data is slower.
Incremental backup: This is much like a differential backup, but with one main difference. Whereas a differential backup saves data that has been added or changed since the last full backup, an incremental back up saves all changes, no matter what kind of backup was done before.
Mirror backup: This creates a duplicate of the source being backed up, in real time. It has one major flaw, however. If something is accidentally deleted in the source, then it disappears from the backup too. Many IT professionals don’t rate the mirror backup as an effective solution.
Recovery Types
Here are the four terms relating to backup and recovery that you need to know:
Business continuity: This is about how to keep your business operating if problems like data loss develop. A business continuity plan usually focuses on the core functions that are critical to a business. Every business needs a continuity strategy to manage glitches that can affect operations.
Disaster recovery: This is a dedicated plan to get back up and running if disaster strikes your data. It could be an attack by cybercriminals, user mistakes or even sabotage. It’s too late to formulate a disaster recovery plan after data loss. Having a pre-existing plan will save time and help minimize the problems that could cripple your business operations.
Recovery point objective (RPO): This concerns what data you have to recover in order to get back on track, at least in order to restore basic functioning. Do you need data from the last minute, hour, day or week to resume operating?
Recovery Time Objective (RTO): Preventing data loss and getting it back if lost is the ultimate goal, but how long that will take can also be crucial. Too long, and your business could be out of business. The shorter the time period, the sooner you will need a full restore to be carried out.
At Quikteks, we offer a comprehensive backup and disaster recovery that can keep you going even after the most devastating data loss incident. For more information about disaster recovery, business continuity, and data backup call our professional technicians at (973) 882-4644.