What is Data Backup and Recovery? Data Backup System: Definition and Types.

The types of data that you almost certainly should be backing up may include:

Any documents: word files, spreadsheets and other documents are typical examples of things you likely need to back up. In case you are working on a different person’s computer, it helps to always have a flash-drive ready for use. Then you can simply copy to it, besides also being able to send the document via e-mail to your mailbox, or upload it to a cloud service and have it on-line.

Application and OS data. Any of the valuable entries that you do throughout the day should be protected and have a copy. These entries include e-mails, calendar entries, browsing history, contacts, social media and, often overlooked, application and operating system settings.

Media. Photographs, videos, sounds and other media need backing up. Media files are typically much larger in size, and may require a different strategy. This is discussed later in the article, in the context of the appropriate data backup and recovery systems.

The idea of a backup seems relatively easy at first, however, it can be somewhat problematic to figure out the best way to implement it – and the best backup type to use. There are three main types of backup that are used the most in the industry:

• Incremental backup – generates a copy of data that changed since the last backup was performed; this backup is relatively fast and not too storage-heavy, but it does create a lot of different backup versions that might be problematic to put together when there’s a need for it.
• Differential backup – a somewhat similar principle to an incremental backup, this one generates a copy of every file that was changed since the last backup was performed; the only difference is that differential copies everything after a full backup only, while incremental detects changes after backups of any type.
• Full backup – the most simplistic one out of the three, generates a copy of all of your data; it creates extremely large backup batches and takes a long time to perform, so it’s not uncommon for it to be used in combination with other backup types.

More information about backup types and specifications can be found in our article about types of data backup.

Disaster recovery (or DR) in IT is a significant part of security planning as a whole. It is a set of procedures and policies that are supposed to protect your business in case of some sort of negative event, be it cyberthreats, natural disasters, building failures, device failures, and so on.

The entire point of disaster recovery is to help you with recovering from a negative event as fast as possible to preserve business continuity. It does take a large number of processes as a prerequisite, such as risk assessment, business impact analysis, and so on. That way, you can identify specific IT services that can be used to support the most important parts of your business. You can use our whitepaper to learn more about how to implement a successful DR strategy.

Since there are many different measures that can fall under the disaster recovery as a whole, it’s possible to find out three main categories of measures that can be used:

• Detective – used to detect and discover various negative events;
• Corrective – tasked with correcting errors that have been caused by negative events or disasters;
• Preventive – aimed at preventing negative events in the first place.

While making the RPO shorter means that you would potentially lose less data – it also means you’ll need more storage capacity and likely pay more for more frequent backups. Similarly, at the same time it’s safe to say that a longer RPO likely costs less – if you’re willing to increase the risk of greater data loss.

A lot of companies, especially starting businesses and small or medium-sized companies are using an RPO period of 24 hours – it means there’s only one backup created each day. Using newer solutions and applying a larger budget you might be able to afford an RPO time of several minutes. There’s also the possibility of having different RPOs for different parts of your data (tiered RPO) based on your own priorities. That way you can backup the most crucial data more often and implement a much longer backup time for less important data.

One more important term worth mentioning is ‘Recovery Time Objective’ (RTO). This  represents the overall time it takes for you to recover your backed up data in case of a software/hardware failure and get back to the point of working normally again. One of the main principles of business is that if your system is down, you are losing money – and the faster you are able to recover, the less money you lose. But it is not that simple: in the same way as with RPO, making your RTO shorter means you will likely have to get better software and more hardware that can restore your data more quickly – and it can become rather expensive after a certain point. Regarding industry standards; the overwhelming majority of businesses keep their RTO at the “several hours” mark.

It helps to determine how often you change your files. If you need to edit documents frequently and on an ongoing basis, it may be best to back them up via the Internet (either an automated online service, as discussed in the above, or with a more basic, manual online method). However, the internet can be a very slow option for backing up large media files. For this issue try using physical hard drives which can then be taken off-site and offline to ensure their safety. By the way, don’t forget about good old-fashioned CDs and DVDs. They are cheap and versatile, but do tend to be slow. It all depends on how often your data changes, how much data you need to safeguard, how critical it is, and how patient you can be.

Creating a centralized data backup system is a good multi-server solution, where you connect several computers to one another, get internet through a router and use network-attached storage (NAS). The backup storage device is universal to all of the computers in the local network. This can be useful for using other devices, including printers, and for managing a high volume of data. The majority of NAS drives are already equipped with some tools for backing up. With them, you get instant access to a very large drive, which can hold large-file media from every connected PC. IT departments and data centers are often using such network attached storage devices, because of their efficiency.

What is in the backup and recovery solution structure?

There are multiple types of backup tools, services and solutions available on the market, with each offering different RTOs, RPOs and/or the overall data amount they can work with. The information below gives a general idea of their classification.

Hardware Backup and Recovery Systems (Appliances)

Actual hardware storage is often represented by various rack-mounted devices of different sizes that can be installed and connected to your company’s internal network. Most of the time they are easy to both install and configure – you rarely even need to install any software to make it work, nor to provide some sort of separate server or OS to start your backup and recovery process. The backup process itself can be started once you’ve installed the necessary software on your working systems. This type of backup solution can give you access to files you’ve backed up, as well.

One thing you need to remember is that if this type of device is your only data backup repository, and it fails – you’ll likely lose everything. You can have a secondary backup solution to lessen the potential of such a disastrous event, but your recovery time is going to get longer due to the sudden need to access your secondary backup solution. On the other hand, it may be possible to support your physical backup with a cloud-based one as well. This solution could work well for long-term data storage purposes.

Rack-mounted devices are not the only example of a hardware data storage, it can also be pretty much anything that can store data, from USB flash storages and CD/DVD disks all the way to optical storage and magnetic tape recorders. There is also one more popular option – to use NAS (Network Attached Storage). You’ll be able to keep large amounts of data and be able to restore both complete backups as well as individual files or segments of your backup.

Cloud Backup and Recovery Systems

Modern IT trends are quite actively exploiting putting increasing amounts of data in the “cloud” – and data backup is no exception to that trend. That is why there are multiple service providers offering backup-as-a-service (BaaS) as another type of backup solution. By installing certain agents onto your computers and other devices you can both backup and restore the data between that device and the cloud storage provided by the vendor. Out of the currently presented three types (hardware, software and cloud-based), BaaS is the least complicated one, as you don’t have to get yourself a storage of some sort and you don’t have to install and configure any other complicated software such as  an OS.

On the other hand, if you’re dealing with and storing any kind of sensitive data, you might want to check if your chosen BaaS vendor meets your required standards before entering into a backup and recovery contract with it. For example, security standards are a likely aspect to consider carefully.

• Capability to adapt to heterogeneous environments, since it is not uncommon for businesses to use many different types and versions of hardware and software appliances
• Configuration options for different backup levels; while this is basically a prerequisite for most of the backup software providers, having more customization options in terms of backup levels, types, and other operations is always a plus
• Integration options with different devices, not just desktops on a specific OS – smartphones and tablets also have to be included in the supporting package