Data is the lifeblood of any business and making sure it’s protected against both natural and human-made disaster is critical.
Data loss can be a significant setback for companies of all sizes, and in some cases, it can even lead to the organization’s demise. Giving your business the best chance of survival starts with investing in a robust backup strategy.
In this article, we’ll explain four of the most common backup methods. With a basic understanding, you’ll be better equipped to decide on a solution that meets your business’s unique needs.
Why backup business data?
Before we get into the how, let’s start with the why. Why should you invest valuable resources into a backup system? Here are three compelling reasons:
1. Protect against unpredictable disasters
You can’t stop natural disasters from striking and floods, fires, storms, and hurricanes can completely destroy your data. Hardware failures, too, are unpredictable. Ask yourself this: what would happen if your business servers just died? It’s a scary thought, but one that’s worth pondering.
2. Protect against malicious hackers
Cybersecurity is a growing concern for business owners across the globe. In the first six months of 2019, a staggering 3,800 publicly disclosed security breaches exposed 4.1 billion records.
If your network is compromised, sometimes erasing local data is the only way to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands.
3. Protect against human error
We’re all guilty of it – working on a document for hours, days, even weeks only to accidentally delete it off of our device. With a reliable backup system in place, you can quickly and easily recover lost files.
Four common backup strategies explained
The importance of backing up data is catching on. As of 2019, 80 percent of computer owners regularly back up the data on their devices. This is up 4 percent from 2018 and 15 percent from 2008.
While there are over ten different ways to backup data, here are the four most common methods.
Full backup
A full backup is exactly that – a backup of every single file and folder stored on the system. No matter what kind of tech trouble you run into, you’ll have access to the lost data. The drawback? Full backups take longer and require more space.
Incremental backup
Incremental backups work like this: an initial full backup is made. Then, subsequent backups only store the changes made since the previous backup. With this strategy, restoring data is a little slower, but the backup process itself is much quicker and requires less space than a full backup.
Differential backup
Differential backup is very similar to incremental backup. First, an initial full backup is made. Subsequent backups only store the changes made. Differential backups require a little more storage space than incremental backups but they do offer faster data recovery.
Mirror backup
Mirror backup systems take an exact copy of the data. The key benefit of mirror backups is that they don’t store old, outdated files – when a file is deleted from the source, they disappear from the backup, too. This means mirror backups don’t demand as much storage space as full backup systems.
There are disadvantages, too. If files are deleted accidentally, they may be lost for good.
If you’d like to know more about how you can better improve your backup and data recovery strategies, contact us today.
