What is data backup and recovery?

Maintaining a database that is immune to failures is the most essential part of your business. Imagine you lose your client's account status and contact information due to a corrupted disk drive. How will you run your business activities now? This is where data backup and recovery comes into the picture.

You can lose data due to software or hardware failure, human error, natural disasters, cyberattacks, and data theft among other reasons. Keeping a copy of your original data and a recovery process ready, will help you run your daily business operations even if you face a database failure.

Data backup protection might sound simple – you might think “I need to store a copy of my data, that's it?” However, it involves nuances such as how to store the backup, how often to backup files, the parameters to keep in mind while creating a data backup and disaster recovery plan, and much more.

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What do we mean by data backup and recovery?

Data backup refers to making copies of your original data and storing it securely so that you can use it to resume your business operations in case of database failure. On the other hand, recovery lays down the process of organizing or restoring your database to its original state for it to become operational.

No matter if you run a small business online or a Fortune 500 company, data is the fuel of your business. To be prepared for unexpected data failure, reduce recovery costs, and keep your customer's trust in your business, data backup protection is a must.

Here's what your data backup must contain –

Physical backup: Physical backup is the heart of your database backup. It involves copying your physical database files including control files, log files, and archived redo logs.
Logical Backup: Logical backup as the name suggests involves copying data that is critical to structure your database to its original state when resorted. Logical backup consists of tables, procedures, views, and functions, among other structural information.

Which data backup solution should I adopt?

While you start preparing your data backup protection plan, the first thing you should pick is the location of your backup. Storing your backup in remote off-site servers and external storage drives are two popular options out there. Offsite servers provide you subscription based data backup plans where you can store massive amounts of data at affordable rates. You can also choose to store your backup in an external storage drive.

Cloud backup is yet another preferred choice for data backup and recovery as it saves both cost and effort. In a cloud backup plan, you store your primary backup on a public or a proprietary network. Payment plans are often based on the bandwidth, capacity, and number of users.

Every business is unique and thus, requires a different backup method. You can either choose to backup your entire database at once, backup data that has been added to your database since the last backup, or backup all data that has changed since the previous backup.

The frequency of your backup plays a major role in your data backup protection plan. Based on your business requirements, you can automate data backup daily, weekly, or on a monthly basis. For financial data, client accounts, and other essential data, daily backup is an obvious choice.

Is Data backup protection enough?

Data backup alone is not enough. Backing your database does not restore all your business data and settings. Computer clusters, database servers, and active directory might need an additional disaster recovery plan. Disaster recovery is an umbrella term for all the policies and procedures you should implement to safeguard your business from unplanned events. Data backup and disaster recovery together completes your data recovery strategy.

An ideal disaster recovery plan consists of preventive measures, corrective measures, and detective measures. Preventive strategies determine how your business can prevent data failure from happening. Corrective measures ensure you have a robust data backup protection plan in case a data failure occurs. And a detective approach involves detecting loopholes in your system. Combine these three and you can possibly keep your business running even in the worst data failure scenarios. That’s exactly what we offer.

How can Northriver help you?

At Northriver, we help your business with a robust disaster recovery plan. Be it data loss due to a power outage or a major data breach, our cloud-based disaster recovery plan ensures that your business operations are up and running as early as possible. Contact us if you want to create a secure database system that is capable of restoring your business operations quickly if a data failure event strikes.

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