Smart IT Solutions For Your Business

Understanding a few essential terms can help shape your strategic decisions and enable you to better evaluate backup and disaster recovery solutions.

Core Concepts

Backup: The process of making file copies to another location (local storage or Cloud Storage).
Restore: The process of transferring backup data back to your primary system or data center.

Full Backup: Periodically backs up a complete copy of the data source. Restores involve replacing lost data with the most recent full backup. Fast restores, but backups can be slow and storage-intensive.
Incremental Backup: Starts with a full backup, then periodically backs up only the data changed since the last backup (full or incremental). Restores require applying the last full backup and all subsequent incremental backups. Saves backup time and space.
Differential Backup: Backs up all data changed since the last full backup. Restores require applying the last full backup and the latest differential backup. Backup time increases with each differential, but restores are faster than incremental (only two files needed).
File Backup: Allows backing up specific files and folders, ideal for recovering individual items, often used for endpoints (desktops/laptops).
Bare-Metal Backup: Backs up an entire computer (OS, apps, data) allowing restoration to hardware without a pre-installed OS.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO): The maximum acceptable downtime after an outage before normal business operations must be restored. How much time can you afford to be down?
Recovery Point Objective (RPO): The maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time (e.g., 5 minutes, 1 hour). How much data can you afford to lose?
Failover: The process of automatically switching tasks to backup systems during an outage, ideally seamless to users.
Failback: The process of switching back to the original primary systems once the disaster has passed and they are operational again.

Cloud-based Disaster Recovery: Utilizes cloud infrastructure for the DR site, avoiding large capital investment and management costs. Offers scalability and geographic distance.
On-Premises Disaster Recovery: Involves building a secondary physical datacenter. Often required by sectors with strict data residency/privacy regulations (like banking) but is capital-intensive and requires ongoing maintenance. Cloud solutions are gaining popularity due to cost-effectiveness.