What is Importance of Data Backup?

Data Backup is an important process in the life of any IT structure. One of the experts of IT Companies in Birmingham depicted it as a parachute to rescue in case of an unforeseen catastrophe. At the same time, data backup is used to create a kind of historical archive of the company's business activities during a certain period of its life. Working without a backup is the same as living in the open air - the weather can deteriorate at any moment, and there is no place to hide. But, how to organize it correctly in order not to lose important data and not spend fantastic amounts on it?

Backup Targets and Tasks

In the process of organizing a backup, there are two main tasks- the restoration of infrastructure in case of failures (Disaster Recovery) and the maintenance of an archive of data in order to subsequently provide access to information for previous periods.

There are several factors that distinguish a backup for fast recovery from an archive:

Period of data storage: IT Support Derby research team pointed out that in archive copies, it is quite long. In some cases, it is regulated not only by business requirements but also by law. Copies for disaster recovery are relatively small. Usually, one or two (with increased reliability requirements) backup copies for Disaster Recovery are created with a maximum interval of two days, after which they are overwritten with fresh ones. In particularly critical cases, it is possible to update the backup more frequently for disaster recovery, for example, every few hours.

Fast access to data: The speed of access to the long-term archive is in most cases not critical. Usually the need to “raise the data for the period” occurs at the time of checking documents, returning to the previous version, etc., that is, not in emergency mode. Another thing is disaster recovery when the necessary data and serviceability of services should be returned as soon as possible. In this case, the speed of access to the backup is an extremely important indicator.

The composition of the copied information:  An archive copy usually contains only user and business data for a specified period. The copy for disaster recovery, in addition to this data, contains either system images or copies of operating system and application software settings, as well as other information necessary for recovery.

Sometimes it is possible to combine these tasks. For example, the annual set of monthly full "snapshots" of the file server, plus changes made during the week. True Image will be suitable as a tool for creating such a backup- IT Support Managed infrastructure services expert.

The most important thing is to clearly understand why reservations are made. Let me give an example- a critical SQL server failed due to a failure of a disk array. There is suitable hardware in stock, so the only solution was to recover software and data. The management of the company addresses with a clear question: “When will it work?” - And it is unpleasantly surprised to learn that it will take as long as four hours to recover. The fact is that throughout the entire service life of the server, only databases were regularly backed up without taking into account the need to restore the server itself with all the settings, including the software of the DBMS itself. Simply put, our heroes kept only the database, and forgot about the system.

What follows from this: you need to use both types of backup: for disaster recovery, and for archival storage. At the same time, it is necessary to determine the list of resources to be copied, the time of task execution, and also where, how and how long backup copies will be stored.

With small amounts of data and not very complex IT infrastructure, you can try to combine both of these tasks in one, for example, to do a daily full copy of all disk partitions and databases. But it is still better to distinguish between the two goals and select the right means for each of them. It is clear that determining the goals and objectives of the backup, as well as solutions for implementation, it is necessary to proceed from the requirements of the business.

When implementing the task of disaster recovery, you can use different strategies.

IT Services Derby staff said that in some cases, direct restoration of the system to bare metal (bare metal) is necessary. This can be done, for example, using Acronis True Image bundled with the Universal Restore module. In this case, the server configuration can be returned to service in a very short time. For example, a partition with an operating system of 20 GB is quite realistic to lift from a backup copy in eight minutes (provided that the archive copy is available over the 1 Gb / s network).

Published By: IT Solutions

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