Business | August 8, 2024 6 min to read

Data Backup and Recovery Guide: What Is It and How Does It Work

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Data backup and recovery – and having a strategy for securing data – are essential for organizations of all sizes. In the event of hardware failures, data corruption and cyberattacks, the ability to recover lost data can be a life saver.

Simply creating backups isn’t enough — they must also be tested. Only 57% of organizations find that when they need to recover data from a backup, the data recovery is successful. Here, we’ll discuss the importance of data backups and recovery and how to achieve data security while protecting your organization against data loss.

What Is Data Backup and Recovery?

Data backup and data recovery are two key elements of protecting your data:

Backup refers to the process of making secure copies of your data so taht you may restore and recover when needed.. Making a backup involves copying databases, documents, and other important information so files can be recovered if the original is lost.
Recovery is the process of using a backup to restore data. For example, if a database becomes corrupted or a user accidentally deletes a document, it can be restored from a recent backup.

What Is the Difference Between Backup and Recovery?

The terms are frequently used in the same sentence, but there’s an important distinction between backup and recovery. Many providers offer solutions for creating backups, such as uploading copies of files to the cloud. However, the process of recovering those files can be a challenge. Data recovery tools offer fast and effective ways of getting the important data you need back.

Common Causes of Data Loss

Modern businesses process huge amounts of data, and many things can go wrong. Some common causes of data loss include:

Human error: This occurs when someone mistakenly deletes files or runs commands that cause data in a database to become corrupted.
Hardware failures: A power outage at the wrong moment could cause data on a hard drive to become corrupted. Solid-state drives may also fail after a certain number of write operations.
Software failures: A software crash could cause an application to overwrite a file being worked on with corrupted data.
Malware and viruses: If a device on your network becomes infected with malicious software, it could delete or overwrite important data and cause damage to your computer’s system files, rendering data inaccessible until the computer is repaired.
Ransomware: This is a form of malware worthy of singling out for special mention. Ransomware takes control of a user’s computer and encrypts any important files it finds. Victims are required to pay a ransom to get their data back.
Natural disasters: Fires, floods, earthquakes, and other adverse events can result in catastrophic damage to data centers, making the original files and any on-site backups inaccessible.

Of all the causes of data loss listed above, ransomware is perhaps the most worrying. Attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Today, resilient forms of ransomware persist through attempts to clean the system, resulting in repeated infection. This makes having immutable backups essential.

Types of Data Backup

Consider your backup strategy carefully to ensure you always have copies of your data available. There are several ways of making backups, including:

Full backups: A full backup involves making a copy of all the data you want to preserve. This is the simplest strategy, but it takes up a lot of storage space.
Incremental backups: With an incremental backup strategy, the first backup is full. Future iterations only include files that have changed since the last backup.
Continuous backup: Every time a file or folder is changed, the change will trigger a backup in real time, so there’s always a recent copy of the data available.
Application-aware backup: Often used for database or email servers running in virtual machines, application-aware backups create transactionally consistent copies of the application, making it easy to recover it in a recent state.
Reverse incremental/Differential backups: This approach involves keeping a recent full backup and preserving older states by noting which files were changed. This is the opposite of traditional incremental backups, which are forward-looking.

Data Backup Approaches

Your backup policy should include storing copies of important data on multiple media, with at least one of those backups being off-site. Some popular data backup approaches include:

On-premises backup: Useful as a first-line backup, holding data on the premises is inexpensive and relatively simple to set up using a NAS backup solution. However, on-premises backups don’t offer protection against fires, natural disasters, and other localized threats to your business continuity.
Cloud backups: Transferring data to a public or private cloud data center ensures there’s an off-site copy. However, there may be regulatory compliance and security issues to consider with the public cloud. Cloud service providers may also charge for data ingress/egress, so this should be considered when budgeting for large backups.
Hybrid cloud backups: Using a mixture of on-premises backups and one or more cloud providers for a hybrid cloud setup helps ensure maximum data availability. This is particularly true if you’re able to take advantage of multiple providers located in different data centers.

To ensure your cloud backups are secure, take precautions. Encrypt your data and harden your cloud services. Using proper access control systems, proactively patching your applications, and monitoring your services for signs of intrusion will go a long way toward maximizing your cloud security.

Types of Data Recovery

Data recovery involves restoring lost data from a backup. This can be done in several ways, including:

File-level recovery: This form of recovery is useful if only a few files or documents have been lost or corrupted. For example, if a user accidentally deleted something they needed from their network folder.
System-level recovery: In the event of serious corruption, such as a server failure, restoring a system-level backup is a relatively quick and easy way to get up and running.
Disaster recovery: When an organization’s critical IT infrastructure has been impacted by a natural disaster or other major unforeseen event, its disaster recovery plan will come into play. This will most likely involve restoring backups of servers and virtual machines at a separate data center, making use of application-level and system-level backups.
Cyberthreat response and recovery: Malware or ransomware infections can be difficult to recover from. Because infections can persist through simple data restores, a more thorough approach to data recovery is required, including a forensic inspection of the network, and wiping infected machines to prevent a second attack.
Application-level recovery: Application-level backups focus on the data required to restore an application to a working state. For example, if a database server fails, an organization could spin up a new database in the cloud and restore a dump of that database to get back up and running.

The Role Data Backup Plays in Disaster Recovery

The connected nature of the modern world means it’s common for even small companies to do business with customers from all over the world, and those customers expect those companies to be online and available, with safeguarded data.

Disaster recovery planning helps ensure your business is always operational, no matter what’s happening. Data backups are an essential part of any disaster recovery plan — without backups, recovery can’t happen.

From power outages and hardware failures to extreme weather, many things affect the data availability your business depends on. Your recovery plan should include strategies for:

Working if your business premises are unavailable
Keeping online services running through data center disruptions
Communicating with staff and customers in the event of service outages
Restoring data if key servers/services go offline

Backups are an integral part of disaster recovery plans. It’s not enough to plan to switch your online store to run from a failover IP and server in a different data center. If that server doesn’t have a recent copy of your stock and order database, you run the risk of lost orders or confusion over stock levels.

Having a plan in place for keeping multiple, recent copies of your data and restoring one of those copies as part of your disaster recovery plan allows you to get back up and running as quickly as possible.

Benefits of Data Backup and Recovery

Taking backups may seem like “busy work,” and many organizations go years without needing to restore data from a backup. However, in the event that something does go wrong with a server or an employee deletes a crucial document, you’ll be glad to have them.

Having a business continuity and disaster recovery plan gives you peace of mind and offers potential benefits, including:

Reduced risk of data loss: Thanks to multiple layers of redundancy, it should always be possible to recover a backup of any important information.
Risk mitigation: It’s not possible to completely avoid the risk of cyberattacks or natural disasters, but having backups dramatically mitigates the risk those things pose to your business.
Business continuity: If something goes wrong, you’ll have a recovery plan that can be put into action immediately, getting your team back up and running and reducing any lost productivity.
Cost savings: The cost of data loss can be significant. According to a report by Fortinet, around 70% of organizations choose to pay at least part of a ransomware demand in the hopes of recovering their data.
Improved regulatory compliance: As the regulatory landscape evolves to cater to an increasingly digital world, organizations must stay up-to-date with standards and regulations relating to PII storage and processing. From GDPR to ISO 27001, backups should be considered across all aspects of data handling.
Avoiding brand damage: Data recovery is crucial for avoiding brand damage. When data loss occurs, it can disrupt operations, erode customer trust, and tarnish your reputation. With reliable data recovery solutions, you can quickly restore critical information, ensuring business continuity and maintaining your brand’s integrity.

Safeguard Your Data with Veeam’s Backup and Recovery Solutions

Backups are essential for any business, but they’re only useful if you know they work and have a plan in place for recovering them. Every organization needs a good disaster recovery plan that addresses what data should be backed up, where those backups should be stored and how you’ll recover your data.

From ransomware to hardware failures, business owners face threats to their data from all sides. Fortunately, modern data protection solutions allow you to automate your backup processes and streamline the recovery process.

To learn more about backup and recovery solutions for your organization and see how Veeam can help you protect your business’ data, contact us today to request a consultation or book a demo.