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Best Data backup and replication solutions

What is Data Backup? Data backup is a practice of copying data from location A to location B to keep it intact in the time of a tragic situation or malicious attack. Data Backup and Replication solutions are equally important for both large and small business companies. From a student using a computer for his/her study projects to business tycoons of the world, everyone needs data backup and replication solutions. Even though data backup and replication solutions for small businesses are relatively easy and different as compared to multinational companies. Backup and replication solutions are quite crucial to maintain and access the previous data files of the companies. This may include media files, documents, configuration files, machine images, registry files, and operating systems.

                                                           

Concepts of backup solutions:                                                                                           

Backup tools and solutions: With the data amount generated every day it's impossible for any business company to backup data manually. Some kind of technological solution is necessary for backing up data. There are backup solutions for small businesses as well, you can choose that if you are a small industry owner.                                                                                                               

Backup administrator: Every business firm has some specified employees which are responsible for the smooth functioning of backup systems. Their job is to make sure that data backup systems are working and to test them at regular intervals to ensure that critical data files are backed up.                

Importance and schedule of backup: Backup scope and schedule is a specific backup policy in which every organization has to decide which data files and how frequently are to be backed up.                                              

(RPO) Recovery Point Objective: Recovery Point Objective is the magnitude of data affordable to lose for any company in case of disaster. It mainly depends on backup frequency. If systems were backed up once per day the RPO will be 24 hours. The lower the RPO the higher the data storage.                         

 (RTO) Recovery Time Objective: It's  the time taken to restore data from backups and resume normal functioning. Large volumes of data files stored off-premises can take a bit longer. Low Recovery Time Objective can be achieved through robust technical solutions.                             

Significance of Disaster Recovery Plan: These facts and figures will make you understand the impact of disasters on business and the importance of having a data backup plan as a part of a complete disaster recovery plan.   

Cost of downtime: According to Gartner average downtime cost for a business is 5600$ per minute.       

Survival rate: In another study, Gartner found that merely 6% of total companies affected by disaster don't have a disaster recovery plan and continue to be in disaster for more than two years after getting affected by the disaster.  

Causes of data loss in percentage: Most common causes of data loss are hardware failure (31%), virus and malware penetration (29%), and human error (29%). Apart from these, error in functioning of data backup and replication solutions is also a source of data loss.                                                            

Data backup solutions:

There are several ways to backup your data. Pick the best option according to your requirements which helps you to create a comprehensive data backup plan for you. Here are six most used and well-reputed data backup methods which you can use.       

Removable media:

Using removable media is a relatively simple option for data backup which uses devices like DVDs, CDs, USB drives and Blu-Ray disks. These methods are one of the backup solutions for small businesses because to backup large volumes of data you need a bigger number of disks which can be difficult to manage and can complicate the recovery process. Tape backups are also regarded in this category.         

Redundancy: In this method, we establish an extra hard drive which is a replication of a drive of a system having sensitive data. Such as having another email server as a backup of the main email server. Although this is a strong data backup technique but difficult to manage because it requires more frequent replication between cloned systems and it's only useful against the failure of a specific system unless or until redundant systems are in a remote site.      

External Hard Drive: This type of drive can be used to save important data as backup through archive software, stored files can be restored from an external hard drive with an RPO (Recovery Point Objective) of a few minutes. However, as the volume of data increases RPO also increases.           

Hardware Appliances: These backup hardware appliances come with a large storage capacity and built-in backup software. You only need to install backup agents which you want as back up on your system, define your backup schedule and policy and data streaming will start to your backup device.                                     

Backup software: Software-oriented backup solutions are relatively difficult regarding configuration and deploy as compared to hardware appliances but they offer more flexibility. Software backup systems allow you to decide which data and systems you'd like to backup, specify backups to a  data storage device which you choose and automatically manage the backup process.                           

Cloud-based backup solutions:

These are convenient to use and have the advantage that data is saved and can be accessed from a remote location. Data storage costs are relatively higher as compared to the cost of the same storage in on-premises.    

Backup solutions for small business: Data backup is as important for small business owners as for a multinational company. Here is a list of backup solutions for small business. These are basically cloud based backup solutions for small business.

●       Carbonite

  • Equiniti
  • CrashPlan
  • Backup Blaze
  • Atlantech

Data replication: Data replication is a technique of storage in which same data files are stored at multiple locations in order to enhance system reliability, resilience and to improve data accessibility and availability. One most prominent advantage of this technique is disaster recovery and business continuity which ensures a precise data backup is available anytime particularly in case of hardware failure, catastrophe or system breach, or any other possible situation where data is compromised.

Data replication solutions:                       

Full table replication: This method of replication copies absolutely everything including new, updated, and existing data files from source to destination. This method is suitable if data records from the source are removed at regular intervals or there will be no suited column for key-based replication in source.  This method does have few drawbacks such as it needs more processing power and generates heavy network loads than copying only changed data.                                             

Key-based incremental replication: This is also known as incremental replication data capture. This method is more efficient than full table replication because this method can replicate only a few required rows of data during each update rather than copying the whole data set.                 

Log-based incremental replication: It is one of the high availability solutions regarding replication. This method is highly specific because it applies to only database sources. Log-based incremental replication process replicates data which is based on information from the database log files which lists changes to the database. This is the most efficient method of all three because it must be supported by source databases like Oracle, MySQL and PostgreSQL. 

High availability solutions:

The term high availability or high availability solutions are referred to as a system, a network, a cluster or a server array. High availability solutions are designed to avoid situations like loss of data and services by managing and diminishing failures and reducing planned downtime. 

Business continuity and disaster recovery:

BCDR or business continuity and disaster recovery are two closely related practices that support the ability of an organization to remain functional after a hard time.  Main role of business continuity and disaster recovery techniques is to control the impact of disturbance and disruptions in business operations.

Importance of business continuity and disaster recovery: Business continuity and disaster recovery practices enable an organization to become stable after facing tough times, minimize the chances of data loss and reputational damage.                                                                                           

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