In the digital age, data is the lifeblood of all businesses, big or small. Your data is invaluable, it covers everything from customer information to critical business processes. For businesses, data is more than just numbers and facts—it’s a strategic asset that can provide insights, drive growth, and give them a competitive edge in the market. However, this valuable asset is constantly under threat from a variety of sources, such as hardware failures, software flaws, cyberattacks, and natural disasters. So how to protect this? This is where server backups come in.
Meaning & Importance of Server Backup
Server backups are copies of your data that are stored separately from your primary data storage. This data can include files, databases, applications, and configurations stored on the server. These backups act as a safety net, allowing you to recover your data in the event of loss or corruption. Let’s understand this concept and types of server backups with the help of a practical example.
Oreo is a major player in today’s age biscuit companies. Consider their case of storing the famous Oreo cookie recipe, as there were assumptions made about the threat of asteroids striking the Earth, Oreo took an extreme step of building an asteroid-proof bunker and filling it with their secret recipe which is a highly secure location for safekeeping. This might seem like an extreme measure for a recipe, but it highlights the importance of protecting valuable information. If this recipe were lost or compromised, it could have serious consequences for Oreo’s brand and business.
Similarly, in the digital realm, your data is your most valuable asset. Server backups serve as a safety net, ensuring that your data is protected against loss or corruption. Just as Oreo takes steps to safeguard its recipe, it’s essential to implement a robust backup strategy to protect your data from threats such as hardware failures, cyberattacks, or human error.
To avoid data loss, it’s essential to have a robust backup plan. While many companies regularly back up their data, about one-third of them encounter issues when attempting to restore the data they backed up by themselves. The key difference lies in their approach to backup strategy.
For most companies, the focus is on determining what data to back up, and ensuring important files are copied regularly. However, others go beyond this, they consider how to back up and which backup types to use.
A solid backup strategy involves more than just copying data. It requires careful planning, such as identifying critical data, determining backup frequency, selecting the right backup methods, and ensuring secure storage. In the following sections, we’ll explore various server backup types and guide you in choosing the best strategy for your business.
Understanding Types of Server Backups
1. Full Backup
Imagine a full backup as taking a complete snapshot of everything on your server. It’s like capturing the entire contents of your digital world—every file, folder, database, and application—in one go. This snapshot is then compressed and stored in a special format that can only be understood by the backup software that created it.
The beauty of a full backup lies in its efficiency when it comes to restoring your data. Because it contains a complete copy of everything, restoring from a full backup is often faster and simpler compared to other types of backups as everything is neatly bundled and stored in a single set of media. This speed of recovery is known as the recovery time objective (RTO), a critical metric in disaster recovery planning.
In essence, a full backup offers comprehensive protection by ensuring that all your data is safely stored and easily recoverable. It’s like having a safety net that covers everything, giving you peace of mind knowing that your data is secure. However, it’s highly cost and time-consuming. Hence in most cases, full backups are typically run only periodically.
How Does Full Backup Work?
Let’s understand with the help of an example how a Full Backup Works
Monday: You create a folder containing 100 documents and perform a full backup. The backup file contains all 100 documents. Tuesday: You add 50 more documents to the folder and perform another full backup. The backup file now contains all 150 documents. Wednesday: You delete 25 documents from the folder and perform a full backup. The backup file still contains all 150 documents, including the ones you deleted. Thursday: You make no changes to the folder and perform another full backup. The backup file remains the same, containing all 150 documents. Friday: You add 75 documents to the folder and perform a full backup. The backup file now contains all 225 documents.
In this example, after five days, you have five backup files, each containing all the documents up to that point. If you were to experience data loss and needed to recover all the documents, you would restore the latest backup file, which contains all 225 documents.
The key point here is that with each full backup, you’re creating a complete copy of all the data. This means that even if you delete or modify some files after a backup, those changes won’t affect the backup file, ensuring that you have a comprehensive and up-to-date copy of your data that can be easily restored in case of data loss.
2. Incremental Backup
Incremental backup is the process of backing up all files, folders, SaaS data, and hard drives that have changed since the last backup activity. This could be the chain’s most recent full back up or the last incremental backup. Only the most recent changes (increments) are backed up. This is done by comparing the modified timestamp of files to the time stamp of the last backup. Backup applications keep track of when backup operations happen to identify which files have been modified since the last backup operations. This backup requires less storage space and results in a faster backup.
How does Incremental Backup Work?
Certainly! Let’s revisit the example with documents, but this time, we’ll apply incremental backups:
Monday: You create a folder containing 100 documents and perform a full backup. The backup file contains all 100 documents.
Tuesday: You add 50 more documents to the folder. Instead of performing another full backup, you perform an incremental backup. The incremental backup file contains only the 50 new documents added since the last backup.
Wednesday: You delete 25 documents from the folder and add 75 new documents. You perform another incremental backup. The incremental backup file contains only the 75 new documents added since the last backup, not including the 25 deleted documents.
Thursday: You make no changes to the folder and perform another incremental backup. Since there are no changes, the incremental backup file is empty.
Friday: You add 100 documents to the folder and perform another incremental backup. The incremental backup file contains only the 100 new documents added since the last backup.
In this example, after five days, you have one full backup file containing all 100 documents and four incremental backup files containing only the new documents added each day. If you were to experience data loss and needed to recover all the documents, you would first restore the full backup file and then apply each incremental backup file in sequence to restore all the changes made since the full backup.
3. Differential Backup
A differential backup operation starts similarly to an incremental backup, copying all data changed since the previous backup. However, unlike an incremental backup, which only copies changes since the last backup (whether full or incremental), a differential backup continues to copy all data changed since the last full backup each time it runs afterward.
This means that while a differential backup stores more backed-up data than an incremental backup on subsequent operations, it typically requires far less storage space, time, and investment than a full backup.
In essence, a differential backup falls somewhere between a full and an incremental backup. It involves backing up files, folders, and hard drives that have been created or changed since the last full backup, capturing a small amount of data between the last backup and the current one. This approach strikes a balance, offering more comprehensive data protection than an incremental backup while requiring less storage space and time than a full backup.
How does Differential Backup work
Let’s revisit the example of backing up documents, but this time, let’s focus on differential backups:
Monday: You create a folder containing 100 documents and perform a full backup. The backup file contains all 100 documents.
Tuesday: You add 50 more documents to the folder. Instead of performing another full backup, you perform a differential backup. The differential backup file contains only the 50 documents added since the last full backup.
Wednesday: You delete 25 documents from the folder. Again, instead of performing a full backup, you perform another differential backup. The differential backup file now contains the 50 documents added on Tuesday and the 25 documents deleted on Wednesday, totaling 75 documents.
Thursday: You make no changes to the folder. You perform another differential backup. The differential backup file now contains the 50 documents added on Tuesday, the 25 documents deleted on Wednesday, and the 100 documents from Monday, totaling 175 documents.
Friday: You add 75 documents to the folder. You perform another differential backup. The differential backup file now contains the 50 documents added on Tuesday, the 25 documents deleted on Wednesday, the 100 documents from Monday, and the 75 documents added on Friday, totaling 250 documents.
In this example, each differential backup captures all the changes made since the last full backup, not just the changes made since the last backup. This means that each differential backup file grows in size as more changes are made, but it always contains all the changes made since the last full backup.
When it comes time to restore your data, you would first restore the last full backup to get all the documents up to that point. Then, you would apply each of the differential backups in sequence to bring your data back to its most recent state.
Which Server Backup is best for your business?
To determine the best server backup strategy for your organization, consider your data volume, backup frequency requirements, storage capabilities, and recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTOs and RPOs). Here’s a detailed guide to help you choose the best backup method for your needs:
1. Data Volume and Backup Frequency:-
Small organizations:
For small data sets, daily full backups can be a practical and efficient backup strategy. Because the amount of data is small, performing full backups on a daily basis requires little storage space and backup time. This method ensures that all data is regularly backed up and can be recovered quickly in the event of data loss.
Large Organizations:
Organizations that handle a large amount of data may prefer weekly full backups combined with daily incremental or differential backups. Incremental backups, in particular, are useful for large data sets because they only back up changes that have occurred since the previous backup, reducing the amount of data that must be stored and the time required for backups. This approach strikes a balance between comprehensive data security and efficient resource utilization.
2. Storage Tips:-
Incremental backups save storage space because they only store changes made since the previous backup. This makes them ideal for organizations with limited storage resources or those seeking to reduce storage costs. Incremental backups are also faster to perform because they only copy the changes that have occurred since the previous backup.
Use Case: For example, a small business with limited storage capacity may choose incremental backups to save space. Because they may not have large data volumes, the incremental approach enables them to keep backups without requiring a lot of storage.
Differential backups capture all changes made since the last full backup, so they require more storage space than incremental backups. They do, however, provide faster restore times because, during the restoration process, all data is restored to its most recent state using only the last full backup and the most recent differential backup.
Use Case: On the other hand, a larger organization with larger data volumes may prioritize faster restore times over storage space efficiency. In this case, differential backups may be more appropriate because they enable faster restoration processes by requiring fewer backup files to be restored.
3. Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO):
Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) are critical factors in determining the effectiveness of a backup strategy for an organization. Understanding these concepts can help organizations choose the right backup strategy based on their needs.
RTO refers to the maximum acceptable downtime an organization can tolerate before operations must be restored. For example, if a business determines that it can tolerate being without email services for up to 4 hours, then the RTO for email services is 4 hours.
RPO is the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time. It defines the point in time to which data must be restored in order to resume normal operations. For example, if a business determines that it can afford to lose up to 1 hour of data in its database, then the RPO for the database is 1 hour.
For organizations with a low tolerance for downtime, such as financial institutions or healthcare providers, minimizing data loss is crucial. Incremental backups, despite their longer restore times, are more suitable in such cases because they allow for more frequent backups. By capturing changes since the last backup, incremental backups reduce the risk of data loss between backups, helping organizations maintain a higher level of data integrity.
Conversely, organizations with a higher tolerance for downtime, such as some manufacturing or retail businesses, may prioritize faster recovery times over minimizing data loss. For these organizations, differential backups may be more suitable.
While they may result in slightly higher RPOs due to capturing changes since the last full backup, they offer faster restore times by requiring only one differential backup and the last full backup to restore data completely. This trade-off allows these organizations to minimize downtime and quickly resume operations in the event of data loss.
4. Testing and Validation:
- Full Backup:
- Useful for: Small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with relatively small datasets and straightforward backup requirements.
- Why: Full backups provide a complete copy of all data, making them easy to manage and restore. For SMBs with limited IT resources, a full backup strategy can simplify backup processes.
- Incremental Backup:
- Useful for: Organizations with large datasets and limited backup windows.
- Why: Incremental backups only copy data that has changed since the last backup, reducing backup times and storage requirements. This is beneficial for organizations with large amounts of data that need to be backed up frequently.
- Differential Backup:
- Useful for: Organizations with moderate-sized datasets and a need for faster restores than incremental backups.
- Why: Differential backups copy all data changed since the last full backup, making restores faster than incremental backups. This is ideal for organizations that prioritize quick restores over minimal storage usage.
Also read: The ultimate guide to What is a server & 8 Finest Server types.
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