Backup and Recovery What is backup and recovery?
Backup and recovery are data management practices intended to protect data from loss or corruption and ensure data availability in the event of a disaster. These practices are critical for business continuity and data integrity. At its best, the backup copy is a perfect duplicate of your data and is readily accessible when you need it.
Recovery is the practice of restoring data from backup copies to its original or a usable state following data loss, corruption, or disaster. For the recovery to be effective, the backup copy needs to be easily accessible and up to date.
- The importance of backups
- Common backup types and methods
- Why is recovery important?
- Common recovery types
- Backup and recovery solutions for SaaS applications
- Backup and recovery best practices
- 3-2-1 rule in data backup
- HPE and backup and recovery
Why are backups important?
Backups are static copies of data available for recovery purposes, suitable for long-term storage onsite or offsite. A backup can be stored on any storage tier including removable media such as tape. They can be easily encrypted, air-gapped, or made immutable against cyberattacks. For this reason, backups are used to store data for years in order to comply with data protection standards and regulations.
Without data protection solutions like disaster recovery and backup, your digital data exists in only one place, such as on a single hard drive or in one instance in the cloud, leaving your data highly vulnerable. One accidental keystroke, one malware attack, or one instance of equipment failure could wipe it all out, much like dropping a sketchbook in a puddle or shredding the wrong stack of papers. Your data is also at risk of corruption, especially during software upgrades or data migrations.
What are common backup types and methods?
Common backup types are:
- Full backups: These are complete copies of all data. This type is the simplest to restore but requires the most storage space and time to complete.
- Incremental backups: These are copies of only the data that has changed since the last backup (whether full or incremental). This method is faster and uses less storage but can be more complex to restore.
- Differential backups: These are copies of all data that has changed since the last full backup. It strikes a balance between full and incremental backups in terms of storage space and restoration complexity.
- Mirror backups: This is an exact copy of the source data, typically without any compression or encryption. It is quick to restore but requires a significant amount of storage space.
Common backup methods are:
- On-premises backups: Backups are stored on local hardware such as tapes, disks, or dedicated backup appliances.
- Cloud backups: Data is backed up to a remote cloud storage service.
- Hybrid backups: Combines both on-premises and cloud backup solutions to offer the benefits of both methods.
Why is recovery important?
The ability to recover as quickly as possible from a disruption is more critical from a business standpoint. A quick recovery is essential whether you are dealing with an entire application, a set of applications, a whole site, or single files. Speed of recovery from a backup will vary based on where the backup is stored, whether on primary storage, a purpose-built appliance, or a tape. The fastest recoveries are most often from disaster recovery solutions, but various backup technologies also offer rapid recovery options.
The type of recovery needed drives the performance requirements over the recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) metrics. While RPO is influenced by the acceptable data loss for an organization, RTO depends on how much of the recovery process has been automated (instead of manual) and how effectively the recovery plan has been implemented and tested, especially when recovering data and applications consistently to a specific point in time.
What are common recovery types?
Common recovery types are:
- File-level recovery: Restoring individual files or folders from a backup.
- System-level recovery: Restoring entire systems or servers, including all files, applications, and settings.
- Application-level recovery: Restoring specific applications and their data, such as databases or email systems.
- Disaster recovery: Restoring critical IT systems and data after a catastrophic event, ensuring that business operations can continue.
Why is a backup and recovery solution important for SaaS applications?
The SaaS model has many advantages, but there is a significant downside: the fragmentation of data across the landscape of SaaS. Each SaaS vendor runs their application as an isolated island, a veritable black box. An organization’s data is stored inside their cloud tenant (or datacenter), but the data belongs to the organization, and the organization is responsible for protecting it.
No matter which SaaS application an organization uses, each vendor typically recommends in their respective terms and conditions that customers use a third-party backup solution to retain the operational data and access they require in the event of an unforeseen disaster or disruption. Assuming that data is secure just because it’s part of a SaaS application is not a risk worth taking. Despite their many advantages, SaaS vendors are not immune to data loss.
What are backup and recovery best practices?
To protect data and minimize the impact of data loss events, organizations should use the following best practices for backup and recovery:
- Regular backups: Schedule and perform regular backups to ensure that data is always up-to-date and protected.
- Offsite storage: Store backups in a different physical location or in the cloud to protect against local disasters.
- Data encryption: Encrypt backup data to protect it from unauthorized access during storage and transmission.
- Automated backup solutions: Use automated tools to minimize human error and ensure consistent backup schedules.
- Testing and validation: Regularly test and validate backup and recovery processes to ensure that data can be restored effectively and efficiently.
- Retention policies: Implement data retention policies to manage the lifecycle of backup data, ensuring compliance and optimizing storage usage.
- Documentation: Maintain detailed documentation of backup and recovery procedures, configurations, and schedules.
- Disaster recovery plan: Develop and maintain a comprehensive disaster recovery plan that outlines the steps to be taken in the event of a data loss, ensuring quick and effective recovery.
Regular review and testing of backup and recovery processes are crucial to maintaining the integrity and availability of data.
What is the 3-2-1 rule in data backup?
The 3-2-1 backup rule is a data backup strategy first developed by photographer Peter Krogh and presented in his book on digital asset management in 2005. Since then, this rule has become the industry standard for data protection and disaster readiness.
- Keep 3 copies of data, including all production data and two backup copies.
- Store backup copies on 2 different types of storage, including any combination of on-premises, cloud, or offline options.
- Ensure 1 backup copy is stored at an off-site location, such as a public cloud server.
The 3-2-1 backup rule is often added to, most often as the 3-2-1-1 rule where one of the copies of data is made immutable for protection against cyberattacks like ransomware. Sometimes additional copies, mediums, and sites are added leading to the 4-3-2-1 rule for added protection.
The benefits of the 3-2-1 backup rule
The key to the 3-2-1 backup strategy is redundancy. By creating multiple copies of production data and storing them in disparate locations, organizations bolster resilience in the event of a major disaster. Should something impact copy one, copy two will be safe in its own storage medium, allowing for easy and fast recovery. And since an organization’s data is the backbone of its operations, this enhanced resilience, and recoverability is crucial to business sustainability and success.
How can HPE help with backup and recovery?
HPE has a range of products and solutions for data protection including backup and recovery that are designed to meet the needs of enterprises. See featured HPE backup and recovery offerings:
HPE StoreOnce System
HPE StoreOnce System is an industry-leading purpose-built backup appliance providing rapid data backup and recovery along with cost-efficient long-term retention on-premises or in the cloud for your workloads. It provides you with the flexibility to select powerful dedicated appliances for data centers and virtual storage appliances for smaller deployments in remote and branch offices.
HPE Storage Tape
Organizations are turning to economical, scalable—and truly offline—LTO tape storage to protect and retain infrequently accessed yet essential data across longer time frames. IT leaders can now address all their retention and compliance needs with HPE StoreEver tape storage solutions, featuring ultra-low total cost of ownership and air-gap protection against ransomware and data corruption.
HPE Zerto Software
The continuous data protection of HPE Zerto Software replicates data in real-time from one-to-many locations either locally or remotely, on-premises or in the cloud. Providing RPOs of seconds and RTOs measured in minutes, HPE Zerto conforms to the 3-2-1 backup rule and prioritizes recovery over data retention. HPE Zerto is a disaster recovery and cyber resilience solution that is used alongside backup solutions that provide long-term data retention.