By Shakeel Rashid, Technical Services Engineer of Supreme Systems. For more information on our products and services please call me on 0845 009 5430 or alternatively email me on shakeel.rashid@supremesystems.co.uk.
What is Backups & Recovery?
Backup refers to making copies of data so that these additional copies can later be used to restore lost or corrupted files in the event of a disaster or a data loss event. Recovery refers to the process of ‘recovering’ that data, either in the form of retrieving data from a damaged hard drive or storage media or downloading it from an online storage space and putting it back where it was supposed to belong.
How it Works
If you work for a company, you may find that every week the guys in the IT department usually put an allotted time on the server for it to start making copies of all the files it holds on its hard drive. These copies are generally stored on media devices such as tapes or DVD discs (DVD’s are only used when small amounts of data up to 4GB need to be backed up). Slowly, companies are starting to take this to another level and have started to backup all their data on either a SAN (Storage Area Network) where extremely large volumes of data can be held or online where data ranging from 50GB to 1TB (Terabyte = 1024GB) can be stored. Once all the data has been backed up (for example on a tape), it is stored in a safe place where there is minimum risk of damage or loss. Sometimes multiple copies of that same tape are made just to be sure.
Who are the users of this service?
Users for this service can be absolutely anybody who uses computers! However, people who generally use this service are usually small and medium sized businesses and certainly every single large multimillion/billion pound corporation that you can possibly think of. It is especially important for large companies as they have endless amounts of data which they must make sure cannot be lost in any instance whatsoever.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Backups & Recovery
The obvious advantage is that you can backup all your data in case of an unfortunate event such as a computer hard drive crash or malfunction. Imagine you are working on a presentation late at night which you must give to your boss the first thing in the morning and suddenly ‘POOF’ your computer switches off and there goes all your hard work and effort. If you don’t have a backup system in place you can imagine the predicament that you are in. Thankfully, you do have a backup system in place and all you do is just restore all the data which you lost thanks to recovery software and off you go continuing your work. You can imagine how helpful this service is when it comes to business critical times.
There are a few disadvantages though. For example the privacy of your data, whoever you give your files to, they will more than likely be able to read all that sensitive information about your company and your clients. Important information such as bank account details, addresses, national insurance numbers and the list goes on and on. Another problem is that if you are a large corporation then more than likely you’re going to need to backup every single spec of your data. This can take an extremely long time and has a heavy impact on the performance of your network as you are just eating away all those network resources.
http://www.SupremeSystems.co.uk
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