What is Data Backup System ?
Data Backup plays an important role in today’s digital world. As we are progressing further and developing new technologies to make our life easy-going, we are generating enormous amount of data. This enormous amount of data is known as Big Data.
Big data means continuous generation of mystify and demystify data. To protect this sort of data is a crucial part of digital system. In order to safeguard this valuable data there is a need of backup system.
Backup of data is an important task to safeguard your digital assets like drawings, photo and database etc. Dependency on digital computer world insists us to take back up of our valuable data regularly. So, what is Backup?
What is Data Backup ?
Backup is a method to keep your data more securely in other places so that in case of loss of data due to hardware failure, malware attack, accidently delete something, fire and natural disaster etc. to retrieve the same. This is a wonderful way to protect your digital world. Keeping data more securely at more than one place help us to restore it at the time of necessity.
Now there is various ways to safeguard your precious data – like cloud storage, magnetic tape, CD, Pen Drive and Memory Card etc. Use the various back up medium to store your valuable data.
Celebration of World Backup Day
To promote importance of regular back up of important data backup and tech industry has started to celebrate 31st March as World Backup Day. The initiation of this day’s credit goes to Maxtor, a company specializing in hard drives. The purpose of this start is to inculcate or promote the importance of backup.
Types of Backup system
There are three types of Backup system available.
Full Backups: A full backup means backup of complete data sets. Full back up essentially makes a backup of everything you wish to protect every time. In this type of backup storage requirement is quite high but backup speed is rather slow. It has fastest restoration speed. One downside of this system is duplication of files.
Advantages
- Quick restore time
- Easy Storage management
- Easy version control allows you to maintain and restore different versions
- File search is easy
Disadvantages
- Need of large storage space
- Time consuming activity
- Additional storage space makes it expensive backup method
- The risk of data loss is high since all the data is stored in one place
Differential Backups: This backup only copies of all files that have changed since the last full backup. In other words differential backup makes a copy of files that have changed since the full backup. Its storage requirement is medium to high as per requirement but it has fast backup and restoration speed. It also duplicates the files in backup system.
Advantages
- Required less space in comparison to full backups
- Restoring backup is quite fast than incremental backups
- Takes less time to backup than full backups
Disadvantages
- Chances of failed recovery of backup, in case of incomplete backup set.
- It takes more time to backup and require more space too.
- Restoration of backup is slow and complex in comparison to full back.
Incremental Backups: Backs up all files that have changed since the last backup occurred. The storage space requirement in this system is low but backup speed is fastest from full and differential backup system. The best part of this backup system no duplication of files. But restoration speed is slowest in comparison to other two systems.
Advantages
- Efficient use of storage space without duplication of file
- Super-fast backups
Disadvantages
- Time consuming task to scout more backup to restore specific file.
- Restoration of files only possible if the entire backups are in good state.
Importance of Data Backup:
Data Backup is really very important in today’s world as we all generating various type of data on daily basis. This data is useful for the development and progress of the mankind. The main purpose of the backup is to create a copy of this data which we can recover any time during befall of an unforeseen event like – malware attack, fire broken out, hardware failure and corruption of files etc.
Our life and the improvement done by mankind revolve around data. Human being has developed various systems using this data and functioning of these systems totally depends on continuously generation of this data and the protection of this data becomes really important.
The goal of the backup is to make a copy of the data that can be restored in the event that the primary data is lost.
What is data cataloguing?
Modern backup software keeps a meta-data catalogue that maintains which version of each file is present in each backup and enables an innovative technique to only restore the data you genuinely need. This eliminates the need to begin with a full backup and add each incremental backup layer by layer. You can download the most recent versions of all files at once.
Follow a backup strategy
A comprehensive backup strategy is an essential part of an organization. It can be defined as an administrator’s plan to ensure critical organizational data is backed up and available for restore in the case of a data loss event
- Determine the data to be backed up
- Decide the frequency of backup
- Select a suitable backup solution based on organizational need.
- Verification of your backup and restore process time to time.
What is 3-2-1 Backup Strategy?
Keeping backup at one place is not a wise practice. It is more crucial in case of sensitive, important and valuable data. So, it will be a good decision to keep your data in multiple storage and location. Here comes the use of 3-2-1 backup strategy which safeguards our valuable data.
This strategy suggests keeping your valuable data in three places on two types of storage with one copy far away from you actual site.
You can better understand this strategy as follows:
What is RPO and RTO in Data Backup system ?
These are the two objectives (defined by any company) that give you the assurance that you can manage the consequences of outages and that these disruptions won't adversely affect your business.
RPO : It stands for Recovery Point Objective. It is the time from the last data backup until an incident occur. In other words, RPO means loss of data to a company during an unforeseen event from the last known backup to resume operation.
RTO : It stands for Recovery Time Objective. It is the time to recover the lost data . It is a time frame to recover from the disruptive event.
It is advantageous to focus time and money on implementing RTO and RPO.
File History Backup facility of Windows
Windows provide a wonderful utility known as File History. It is a utility to backup important documents having in your user account. This way you can recover your important document in case of an unforeseen event like inadvertently deletion or corruption of files. Actually, it is not a complete backup solution instead it only takes the back of your user account files and folders.
To use this utility you must have an external hard disk with recommended capacity of 100GB or greater capacity.
Open Windows settings and select update and security.
Select Backup on the left navigation panel, then select Add a drive under Backup using File History.
To restore the backup, Press Windows Key + I (Open Window’s setting)
Select update and security then select Backup on the left navigation panel
Under “Back using File History”
Select More options
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