Understanding The Link Between Data Backup, Data Recovery, And Disaster Recovery

Data recovery is a complicated process. Creating a sturdy backup is crucial, but it is not enough to maintain business continuity in the face of some catastrophe or human errors. To develop a comprehensive plan to ensure that there is no interruption of business due to data center downtime, which can happen mostly from human mistakes and less from natural calamities like flood, storm, and fire, the solutions for data recovery New York must be coupled with proper disaster recovery plan. The latter is mainly responsible for ensuring business continuity in the face of disasters without ever giving the feeling that something has happened to the system.

Data available from various surveys point to the fact that human error is the primary cause of disasters with power outages contributing a small portion followed by natural disasters. Unless there is some significant disruption arising from natural disasters, large-scale businesses would expect that data recovery happen fast for which just having backup will not help to keep the company going.  Data backup is part of data recovery solutions, but alone it cannot serve the purpose of business. 

Data backup, data recovery, and disaster recovery

Cloud storage and off-site tape are common data backup methods that many companies wrongly think to be sufficient to save them from disaster or outage.  Although backup is convenient and inexpensive, it does not help in quick recovery from disaster.  It only assures that data is safe and recovery would happen at some point in time. People often use the words backup, data recovery and disaster recovery interchangeably although these are entirely different. In this article, we will throw light on each process to lend clarity in understanding it rightly.

Data backup

Data backup is all about preserving copies of data at a safe location so that even if the system data corrupt or become inaccessible, you should be able to fetch it from that location for re-use. Traditionally, backup consists of copying all files in the system to another computer hard disk. It not always necessary to depend on hard drives for backing up data because you can use tape backup, use the cloud storage facility for backing up data and even another secondary computer for copying the data. Backup is essential because should data become inaccessible for any reason like accidents, theft, and break-ins, loss of the device, unforeseen events of data deletion or any other technical issues, you remain assured of recovering it from the location where it has been copied and stored.

Data recovery

The process of accessing backup data to make it available to users is what data recovery is all about. As you can understand, no backup data would have any meaning unless you can get it back to users and therefore, you need a reliable data recovery process. The efficiency of the data recovery process depends on not only safe retrieval of lost or inaccessible data but also how fast you can do it because for any business the speed of data recovery determines how much it would help in maintaining business continuity.  Data recovery process concentrates on the data itself and not on the system as a whole.

Disaster recovery

Disaster recovery relates to your disaster preparedness and comprises of the data backup plan together with the data recovery plan.  Disaster recovery is about having access to data when the entire system is under threat or becomes defunct. If you want to give protection to the whole computer system of which data is a part, it is necessary to work out proper disaster recovery plan so that come what may, businesses need not worry about any stoppages. Disaster recovery plans take care of data center failures and any other kinds of downtime that the system might encounter with the assurance that the system will function in the same way as it was doing earlier.

Make disaster recovery work for you

It is not enough to create a disaster recovery plan, but it is essential to ensure that the plan works in the way you want. Every company has its own disaster recovery plan that works the way it helps to achieve the company objectives. Therefore, no two disaster recovery plans are ever the same although the fundamentals are similar.  To make the disaster recovery plan efficient, create an off-site data backup, preferably a cloud-hosted backup or storing the copied data at some other off-site location that is far away from the servers you use. For complete reliability and easy access, the cloud backup is the best because almost half of the tape backup would likely let you down.

Having clarity about the processes would help to devise the right disaster recovery plan that ensures uninterrupted business.