Small and large businesses all over the world create data every day. In fact, it’s been estimated that some companies double their data creation each year. One of the biggest problems that companies find with having such a big growth in data is being able to properly protect that data.
It’s important to properly secure your data from both natural disasters and accidentally deleting the hard files from your computer. Backing up and data recovery are two common methods used to protect data, regularly used by most companies globally.
Backup
Backup technology involves making a copy of your files and databases and storing it elsewhere to prevent losing that data when natural disasters, system malfunction or human errors occur. To retrieve this stored data is known as restoring.
It’s a good method for getting back lots of data in a short period of time, but it’s important to quickly extend the infrastructure as data continues to grow rapidly, which can cause a burden for tech administrators. Today, it’s common to use disks and tapes as a medium for backing up data, both of which are reliable methods.
Typically, a company will make both weekly and nightly full backups of all the data, keeping it for as long as three months. If unsuitable data management software is used to maintain this backed up data, however, then it can be an ineffective and useless method no better than local storage. If the company wants to hold on to data longer than three months, it can get costly in terms of time, number and personnel cost. Individual employees can use a local backup system or Internet service to backup individual data.
Data Recovery
One other form of data protection that is commonly used is data recovery. Rather than stopping data from being lost, which is the purpose of backing up data, recovery software is designed to salvage the data that was already lost as a result of errors in logical file structure, storage device physical damage or accidentally deleting files that were stored locally.
In most cases, data recovery is required when a part of the operating system fails and makes it impossible to get files that are stored locally on the same partition. If some files were accidentally deleted, there are programs that can help recover that information before it is lost forever. It’s also used in forensic investigations when a criminal attempts to delete evidence.
The Difference Between Recovery and Backup
Recovery and backup systems are used for data retention and protection. According to Carolina Data Recovery, “The backup is the first line of defense used to copy the data that is already here for protection purposes, and recovery is used to help salvage the information that was already lost. In other words, backup is the prevention method that helps protect data from getting lost whereas recovery is the cure for lost data.”
Of course, it’s better to try and prevent data loss rather than rely on recovering data after an incident, though it’s best to have a combination of the two methods. That way, if prevention methods fail to work, there is still the available cure to recovering that data.
By backing up data, you can guarantee that data is always secure and stored elsewhere whereas it’s difficult to absolutely guarantee that data recovery methods will get every piece of data lost from a disaster. Using backed up data is a quick and easy method to recover lost data when recovery doesn’t work, though it may be a little outdated depending on the schedule that your company follows for backing up data.
