The Importance of Data Backup

Data backup is so important. Backup means exactly what it says: precious information is backed up so that it will not be lost forever. Copies of data are made so that, in an event of data loss, the copies can restore the original data.

The issue of data loss has been catapulted into the public conscious on numerous worrying occasions in the past couple of years. In 2008, a civil servant accidentally lost documents that were top-secret and which contained the very latest UK Government intelligence on al-Qaeda by leaving them on a train. Cue public panic.

Then the NHS also lost several millions of patient records in the same year with confidential patient information.

Added to that were the various Government bodies which managed to lose laptops containing data that wasn't encrypted.

But none of this necessarily means that the data wasn't backed up. It merely points to the limitations of the hard-copy backing up of data, and the possibility of human error.

Loss of data to a business can be like loss of its lifeblood. It's estimated that businesses who suffer massive data loss from their computer systems, and by that we're talking the loss of databases, invoices, emails, customer details, contracts and research, will struggle hard to survive for a further 12 months.

Data backup has long been good business practice, but it was common for backups to be kept on something like a tape, which many businesses often stored in the same place as the actual data itself. Of course, anything that caused the loss of the original data, whether it was fire, flood or even burglary, would often amount to loss of data backup too. Tapes can also be easily lost or damaged.

Online data backup is the best practice for business today. This is usually provided by a specialist company which builds a bespoke client software programme that will typically once a day transfer precious data to its own service provider by collecting, compressing and encrypting it first.

Some companies can offer a service that backs up as it goes, detecting each change and saving it as it happens, rather than just once a day, and most online backup services maintain a list of all of the previous versions of files. Many companies that offer this service also offer a free trial period.

There can be disadvantages to online data backup, depending on requirements and circumstance. Sometimes data restoration can be slow; this is dependent on network bandwidth.

Accessibility of data can also be affected if a backup provider fails to weather the economic storm and goes out of business.

But generally speaking, online data backup has many advantages when compared to conventional backup on a tape, for example.

Gino Hitshopi is highly experienced in the realm of data backup, having worked in the data storage industry for many years. For more information please visit: http://www.databarracks.com/.

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