Protecting Your Data with Data Backup
A Backup Article Contributed by Melissa Larose
Protecting Your Data with Data Backup
Most businesses use a routine data backup to protect their data. Many of these businesses take their data backup routine further by using disk arrays and mirroring their networks. Still others do not value their data enough to backup up their infrastructure on a regular basis.
Data Backup is an Investment
If your business was hit with an earthquake, a hurricane, a tornado, an electrical outage, or a disk failure the data backup your IT department has been performing for years would guarantee the survival of your business, right? Think again.
The survival of your data may require more than a traditional data backup plan. If your software causes an error or an employee deletes or corrupts a file during use, or there after, there is no doubt that a traditional backup can be relied upon to restore the data. After all it's only one file right, or a group of files. Anything larger begins to cause a problem especially if the files are presentation or graphics files, or large data base files. These can take some time to restore.
The process can also lower production time and profitability. In some cases a business may be better suited for data backup that involves continuous backup.
Continuous Data Backup
Many companies are deeply IT dependent. These companies require a data backup product that can give them data backup 24/7. These products a re called continuous backup and they monitor your system 24/7. They look for and record all operations that have been applied to your application servers. This information is kept in a journal and your backup process has access to it at all times. Data is not actually tampered with, instead only the operations that have been carried out on the data are recorded in the journal.
If a corruption of data occurs, the server can rewind by playing a counter event (or opposite event) against the data. Recovery can happen very fast in this process.
The idea is to locate the recent continuous state available. This could be just seconds or minutes before corruption occurs and allows for an extremely high level of data integrity. Data loss is negligible is it can be found at all. Terabyte servers can be rewound in minutes as opposed to days. Continuous data backup is very efficient.
Continuous Data Backup Tips
Continuous backup products can vary in actual speed of recovery, by automation levels, and in price. Another area of concern might be the actual bandwidth they may require of your servers.
Look for the capability of placing a manual bookmark before attempting a risky procedure. The software should allow you to return to the initial state of your bookmark.
Also look for continuous data backup software that is very focused in its offering. Some software companies throw a lot of extras into their software that cloud the issue at hand and weaken the software package as a whole. Stay away from these products. If you review your software choices before purchase these catchall products will be easy to spot.
