What is a Data Backup Strategy?

George — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 12:50:13 +0000

A Data Backup Strategy is a plan, method, or series of tasks for obtaining a specific goal – safe data backups! The main factors in a data backup strategy are the following:

Backup medium – The destination backup medium depends on the size of the data being backed up. For smaller amounts of data a low capacity removable drive such as, Pen or Zip drive may be adequate. As the data size increases, you need to have large capacity drives such as, USB external hard drives and for medium to large organizations; a tape drive is usually the backup medium.
Location of the backup medium – The backed up data needs to be held in a safe and secure place. With safe location I mean away from fire or water and dangerous materials. For example, backup tapes are damaged by magnetic fields. Remember that sound speakers contain magnets and produce such fields! With secure location I mean a place that stop burglars from stealing the medium. Ideally, the medium is password protected in case a burglar manages to steal your data would find it difficult to recover it! Another important factor is to store the medium in a location away from your live data – an off-site storage location.
Frequency of backups – is how often you perform data backups. This depends on how much your data undergo changes and/or major events such as, updating an application or an operating system. A home user may perform a backup once a week while an organization most probably performs daily backups. While a home user may be better off with a weekly full backup that overwrites the previous week, an organization needs to implement a full – incremental/differential strategy that spans over a month or more.
Number of generations to be kept – As an added safety you can keep a number of previous backups before overwriting them with new backup jobs. Although, this might be too expensive in terms of storage costs for home users, an organization would typically keep daily backups for a week, weekly backups for a month and monthly backups for a year. Also, this may be more complicated with tougher law and regulatory requirements.
Testing the backup jobs with a recovery exercise - one of the most forgotten and neglected factors is to test that the backed up data is actually there! It would be a nightmare to lose a hard drive and your data due to a virus or a fault but it would be catastrophic to discover that your magnetic tapes that were supposed to store the backed up data were in fact blank! A planned recovery procedure must be done on regular basis to ensure that your backed up data can be effectively restored :)

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What is a Data Backup Strategy?