Backup systems and best practices

Backup and Recovery

Suppose for an instant that a virus infects your total computer system. The virus spreads throughout each employee's workstation, into all documents and database files. All your work and all your data are all destroyed. How would your business recover? Backup and recovery of data is very essential to a company of any size because data is the most important asset a business owns.

Backup is the method of transferring data from your company's main computer system to a separate storage device done at regular intervals and properly stored. A backup must cover any mission critical applications, data that changes on a normal basis, and hardware devices where these applications and data reside. Periodically, you should also backup the entire system in case of a catastrophic disaster. The regularity of backups depends on how regularly your data varies or how significant you view it to be. There has to be sense of balance among capturing the information yet not distracting the actual business.

Aside from the financial implications of data loss, the other reason for data backup has now established to include some legal requirements that have place severe requirements on the managing of information assets. The most recent legislation to impact many corporations is the "Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act of 2002" more commonly refer to as "Sarbanes-Oxley" (Cole & Spears, 2006). The Sarbanes-Oxley Act more specifically requires that 'all records, including emails, be kept for at least five years' (Hope, 2006).

The traditional backup strategies being employed are full, incremental and differential backups (Barret & King, 2005). A full backup copies all the files on the system - the system files, the software files and the data files regardless of whether it has been altered or not and clears any archive bits that were turned on upon completion of the procedure. An incremental backup is a backup of every file on a files system which has changed, or more particularly, that still has an archive bit set on the file since the last backup. A differential backup is a backup of every file on a file system which has changed since the last full backup.

Even though these types of backup strategies implemented in a range of forms have been the standard for many years, variations are now in place. In several cases data backup strategies can consist of what is called 'continuous data protection (CDP)' (Jacobi, 2006). With this technology, data can in some cases be backed up as it is changed.