This paper examines the importance of data backup and recovery for businesses of all sizes, arguing that data is a company's most critical asset. It outlines the core definition of a backup, describes the legal obligations introduced by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 regarding records retention, and surveys the three traditional backup strategies — full, incremental, and differential — alongside the newer continuous data protection (CDP) approach. The paper also emphasizes that any backup strategy must include periodic restoration testing to ensure data can actually be retrieved when needed.
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Suppose for an instant that a virus infects your entire computer system. The virus spreads throughout each employee's workstation, corrupting all documents and database files. All your work and all your data are destroyed. How would your business recover? Backup and recovery of data is 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 a company's main computer system to a separate storage device at regular intervals for safe storage. A backup must cover any mission-critical applications, data that changes on a regular basis, and the hardware devices on which those applications and data reside. Periodically, the entire system should also be backed up in case of a catastrophic disaster. The frequency of backups depends on how regularly data changes and how significant that data is considered to be. There must be a sense of balance between capturing information and not disrupting normal business operations.
Aside from the financial implications of data loss, data backup has also become a matter of legal compliance. Legislation has placed severe requirements on the management of information assets. The most significant recent law affecting many corporations is the Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act of 2002, more commonly referred to as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (Cole & Spears, 2006). The Sarbanes-Oxley Act specifically requires that "all records, including emails, be kept for at least five years" (Hope, 2006).
The traditional backup strategies in use are full, incremental, and differential backups (Barrett & King, 2005). A full backup copies all files on the system — system files, software files, and data files — regardless of whether they have been altered, and clears any archive bits that were set upon completion of the procedure.
An incremental backup backs up every file on a file system that has changed since the last backup — more specifically, every file that still has its archive bit set. A differential backup backs up every file on a file system that has changed since the last full backup. These three strategies, implemented in a range of forms, have been the standard approach to data backup for many years.
"Emerging real-time backup technology overview"
"Why periodic restore testing is essential"
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