What is Data Backup?

Data backup refers to the process of creating duplicate copies of digital data or files to safeguard against data loss if the original data is lost due to malicious action, accident, or disaster. The right backup processes will enable the enterprise to restore data quickly, causing business minimal disruption.

Why data backup is vital

In this digital-first era, data sets are now treated as the ‘crown jewels’ of many organizations and are even regarded by some data experts as more valuable than oil – and they could be right. After all, data informs every aspect of an enterprise’s operations from gleaning invaluable customer insights to analyzing how well company operations are performing.

That’s why backing up data is mandatory for any company that is serious about protecting itself. After all, it only takes a single disaster or a cyber attack to cause significant financial harm to a business. That might sound melodramatic but according to Gartner* research, IT downtime alone can cost, on average, $5,600 a minute.

Outcomes are even worse for companies that don’t have any kind of disaster recovery plan or data backup planning in place (which will include data backup and restoration procedures): Only six percent of organizations with no plans remain in business after two years, according to Gartner**.

Defining data backup

That’s the potentially crippling costs covered – but what does backing up data mean? It’s copying company data from its source to another location – or multiple locations if you follow the ‘3, 2, 1’ principle (see below). Remember, all data essential to the workloads and operations of a company should be copied. For instance:

File server data backup

Back up data including app data, website data, user files, and shared docs.

Database data backup

Backing up data from databases including customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning systems.

Email server data backup

Back up data from mailbox configs and attachments to email content itself.

Application data backup

Back up data from business apps including HR, financial software, ERP, and more.

Configurations file data backup

Backing up data that dictates how an entire company environment is set up including servers and networking equipment.

The list doesn’t end there – any backup data strategy should also consider content management systems, user data, logs/monitoring data, registry files, and more. The rule of thumb? It’s simple – the more data types you back up, the less disruption will be caused by data loss when the data backup plan is executed.

How to create a data backup strategy

Effectively backing up such a wide, often disparate number of data sets represents a real challenge. Thankfully, there are several proven methods for bringing order to such potential data management chaos – and it all starts with a human:

Data Backup Administrator

The backup administrator is the individual assigned the role of defining and managing the company’s data backup strategy, i.e., identifying what company data must be backed up before overseeing the setting up of data backup device/storage backup solutions and testing them on a rolling basis to ensure robustness and reliability. The administrator should also monitor any new software, hardware, and infrastructure changes/implementations that introduce new data sets requiring backup devices or storage. This ensures, that as the company evolves, any new or existing data sources and sets remain backed up at all times.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

This is the point between when a data loss event occurs and when the data was last backed up. You must decide where to strike the right balance – if you back up data every day (that’s an RPO of 24 hours), then you risk losing less data. However, the demands on your infrastructure increase as you burn through more resources including storage and compute.

You can reduce data backups to, say, every three days (that’s an RPO of 72 hours) to save on budget and resources – but the risk is more data will be lost during an event. To manage costs, consider a tiered approach to data backups via RPO, backing up only essential data every day – or even every hour – while introducing longer RPOs for non-essential systems.

Data Backup Scope/Schedule/Solutions

The administrator should coordinate with key stakeholders to determine what the enterprise’s actual data backup policy is – what data is mission-critical and needs to be backed up, and what is non-essential and can ‘afford’ to be lost. Data backup solutions can be hardware, software, or third-party provider-based, offering enterprises multiple routes to securing effective data backup outcomes depending on defined needs (see below).

Recovery Time Objective (RTO)

Equally important as RPO, the recovery time objective is how quickly your operations can recover from a data loss event. Implementing a low RTO solution for backing up data can get you up and running again within a few hours – but will inevitably incur greater costs as faster technologies and more redundant infrastructure are required.

Alternatively, a tiered approach can be considered for your RTO-powered data backup strategy, prioritising data recovery for essential systems, while de-prioritising those systems that are more tolerant of downtime. Ultimately, successful data backup is about striking the right balance between what losses will be incurred during any downtime experienced – think financial, reputational, and productivity – against the cost of implementing and maintaining solutions capable of delivering a low RTO.

Why ‘3, 2, 1’ principle is the ultimate backup strategy

A comprehensive data backup strategy is vital to creating robust business continuity, helping to define a path to successful data recovery. But what is data backup’s most effective strategy?

We recommend the ‘3, 2, 1’ principle, i.e., three copies of your data via data backup. Data should be stored on two different types of media – such as an external hard drive and a server for optimum storage backup – while one copy is stored off-site (for example, a remote server).

Here’s an example of the ‘3, 2, 1’ data backup principle in action. Company X is an SME running an online store, where customers order kits to brew their own beer. The store retains critical information that must be protected, such as customer data. To back up such vital data, Company X creates:

Two data backups of its data in London, one on a server, the other on an external hard disk.
Another data backup is created on a remote server located in Brighton.
In the event of an incident on the London site, the data backup can be found on the remote server in Brighton.
Although the chances of such an incident occurring are minimal, if both servers are destroyed, the external hard drive can restore the lost data on an all-new server.
This minimizes the risk of data being lost centrally on the same site and media.

Enterprise should also consider partnering up with a provider that offers a data Backup as a Service solution for the ultimate recovery planning solution (see below).

What backup types are available?

As well as different data backup solutions, enterprises must decide which backup processes to use. There are several available, depending on the needs of the organization:

Full Data Backup

This is used to copy an entire data set, offering a backup method that is tried, tested, and trusted. However, to back up so extensively takes time so enterprise typically carries out full data backups only occasionally.

Incremental Data Backup

To address full data backup storage and time issues, enterprises can choose an incremental data backup process instead. This only backs up data that has been changed since the full data backup was carried out. That might sound ideal – but recovering full data sets requires the full and all incremental data backups to be retrieved. This takes longer than one sourced from a full data backup exclusively. Also, as data is incrementally backed up, the size of the backup expands, eating into storage space, until the next full data backup is carried out.

Differential Data Backup

Similar to incremental – it only backs up changes made to the last full data backup – but has one key difference; when restoring data, this process only uses the last full data backup combined with the last differential data backup. This means there is no need to retrieve all differential data backups, which saves time while improving restoration speeds.

Synthetic Data Backup

This provides a copy of the full data backup with all incremental data backups included, creating a ‘synthetic’ full data backup. This is ideal for when both resource and time usage are at a premium. Do bear in mind that synthetic backups inevitably use more storage space, introduce further complexity to the backup process, and slow down data recovery.

Other Data Backup Types

Reverse-incremental data backup: This reverses the incremental process by updating a full backup with any incremental changes that were made since the full version was generated.

Incremental-forever data backup: These record any changed data since the last full data backup was made – known as delta differencing – in turn constantly updating the full data backup so it remains ‘forever’ backed up and up-to-date.

What are the different data backup solutions?

There is a wide range of solutions available for backing up company data including hardware, software, and third-party solutions. These include:

Removable Data Backup Devices/Storage Backup Media

These range from USB drives and DVDs to external hard drives. All are ideal for backing up large volumes of data quickly and can be moved from location to location with ease thanks to the backup devices’ obvious portability. The risks however are clear – smaller data backup hardware solutions can be lost, damaged, or even stolen, and hard drive solutions can fail. It means, that while portable hardware is a useful solution, it is not designed to form the basis of a comprehensive data backup strategy – especially for large enterprises managing multiple data sets of huge size.

Hardware Backup Appliances

A more robust hardware solution is hardware appliances that plug straight into a network and back up data. Better still, they offer a ‘plug and play’ experience, typically automated to conduct any backups within specified criteria that can be defined via a simple user interface. Hardware appliances can also offer other useful data backup functionality as standard including encryption.

However, these solutions can become costly depending on the volumes of hardware needed to back up data. And, of course, just like external hard drives, hardware appliances can fail, potentially leaving the enterprise with no data backup solution.

Software Backup Solutions

A more cost-effective solution to hardware appliances, backup software can be deployed on existing systems to manage all data backup processes. Depending on what you are prepared to pay, software solutions offer a range of flexible features including only saving the most recent data changes made since the previous data backup; compressing backups so they take up less storage space, and even backing up data to different locations/devices as defined by the organization.

Backup via RAID

Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) is a storage tech that lets you group multiple hard drives into a single unit for storage backup and backup processes and offers several key data backup benefits. For instance, if a drive fails within the unit, data remains safeguarded by the other drives in the unit (known as redundancy). Data access performance is also significantly improved and additional hard drives can be added to the unit to scale up storage backup space if required.

RAID is also highly configurable thanks to the leveling system it deploys, allowing it to be tailored to the specific needs of the enterprise. For example, RAID 0 (known as ‘striping’) focuses on delivering exceptional performance without any data redundancy, while RAID 1 (‘mirroring’) flips this so data redundancy becomes the sole focus, mirroring the content of one drive to another drive, to guarantee absolute data integrity.

Cloud Backup Services

Some organizations choose to bypass the hassle of on-prem solutions entirely by partnering with a data Backup-as-a-Service provider. This enables you to back up data on the provider’s cloud infrastructure, negating the need for dedicated and costly hardware and software. Using a cloud service offers other advantages including the ability to access data from wherever you are – vital during a disaster – as well as scale up or down the amount of storage backup required.

There are potential risks, however. First, does the cloud provider’s offering adhere to the strict regulations surrounding sensitive data storage? Security robustness at the provider’s end must also be vetted; while a reputable provider will be monitoring for security threats constantly, not all offerings may be as comprehensive.

Finally, cloud solutions can become expensive if used for backing up huge volumes of data. It’s essential then to fully vet the potential provider and figure out true data backup costs being pitched now – and for the long term – before signing on the dotted line.