Backups keep your data safe and protected! Hardware failures such as defective hard disks, sudden system errors after a program update, Computer Viruses, Ransomwares and Trojans are only a few of the threats against computer data. Sudden data loss can easily cause your system to cease functioning. Even your important documents or your family photos could be at risk of getting lost. Taking backups only on the same disk is risky as it cannot protect in events of hardware failure or ransomware attack. Also just having another external hard drive is not sufficient either as they can get corrupted and in case of ransomware attacks, the hacker has access to all the connected drives and possibly all the other machines in the network also. The backup location should be separate and secure.
Backup refers to taking a copy of physical or virtual files or databases to a secondary location for preservation to avoid equipment failure or data deletion by mistake. The backing up process is pivotal to a successful disaster recovery plan. Backups can be automated to make a copy of the data at a specified time and which can then be used to return data to its previous state. Data backup can be made on several Storages like hard disk, CDs, DVDs, USB, network attached storage and you can also make a personal cloud to keep all your data at your site and also sync all your devices.
For enterprises, backup can be used to make a copy of your operating systems and its programs all at once so it is faster to recover rather than rebuilding everything again. This is done by taking the backup of the whole virtual machine and can be automated to run in the night when people are less likely to use the system. Enterprises back up data to protect the data in the case of buggy software, data corruption, hardware failure, hacking, user error or other unforeseen cases. Efficient backup strategy requires routine checking to make sure the data that is being backed up is good and usable for recoveries and no data is being missed. Recovering the data for usability and integrity needs a plan for enterprises to simulate a data loss scenario and recover the data and test the efficiency of their backup instead of being surprised later when an actual disaster occurs.
In earlier times, the database would be backed up separately and in the event of a disaster, the whole operating system needed to be reinstalled and the database software installed and then the data restored, leading to loss of time and loss of business waiting for these to be completed. However it is possible using virtualization to get this done in minutes in case of a data breach or data loss and its extremely cost effective than what a data breach might cost an enterprise in wasted time and lost business.
As information technology environments become more advanced, the job of backing up and recovering data has become more efficient, easy fast and secure. Enterprise backup software can ease this task by organizing processes to take multiple copies of backup and distributing it in different places – like another hard disk or or another system or even to the cloud. Recent feature updates to backup platforms includes taking snapshots of data so that disk capacity is not unnecessarily wasted backing up the entire machine and can be used to backup only the changes which is almost instantaneous.
The three essential golden rules of the backups for even the smallest of deployments are…
1. Use automatic backups and have an alerting system to update the status of the backup.
2. Test the backups for recovery on a test hardware to see how good the backup is.
3, Keep a copy of the backup offsite in another physical location.