Modern businesses can generate massive amounts of data in a short period of time. As such, a vital topic of research are ways to project that data.
There are two main categories of data protection: redundancy and backups. These two types of data protection are both very important, but they are not interchangeable.
Both must be understood so that you are not caught unprepared when catastrophe strikes.
What Is Redundancy?
On a single hard drive, data is saved just one time. If that hard drive fails, then that data is lost. In order to prevent this from happening, multiple hard drives are used to store multiple copies of each piece of data.
This setup is called a “RAID,” which stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks.
When a single hard drive fails in a properly set up RAID, the other drives change how they operate and continue saving files with very little interruption and no loss of data. In a business such as a doctor’s office where appointments are booked out three months in advance, redundancy can be the difference between a service call with less than thirty minutes of downtime and a multiple day outage affecting hundreds of patients and staff.
What Are Backups?
There are many other ways in which data can be lost, including file corruption, accidental deletion, fire, theft, malware, and more.
Redundancy can protect against hard drive failure, but in cases such as these, it is of no help. For example, if the user accidentally deletes a file, all redundant copies of that file will be deleted.
This is where backups come in. Backups copy your data onto a completely separate storage device.
The most secure backup systems are called offsite backups, because the data is copied to another geographic location entirely. If a user accidentally deletes a file that is backed up, that file can be restored using the backup copy.
However, restoring files from an offsite backup can take quite a long time depending on the amount of data and available network bandwidth. Due to this, many businesses keep another backup on a different device in the same building.
This is referred to as a local backup. Since restoring from a local backups only involve sending the data over the internal network, or even directly copying onto another drive, they can greatly reduce downtime.
So, Which Solution Should You Have?
None of these data protection methods are mutually exclusive and each of these methods has strengths and weaknesses.
With that in mind, most businesses will get the most benefit by having all of them in place because each one fills a gap in coverage left by another.
Redundancy will save data if a single drive is lost to mechanical failure, with very little downtime. However, it can’t protect against almost all other types of data loss.
A local backup will protect against all types of data loss except when both the default and backup locations are lost at the same time. Restoring takes longer than a redundant drive, but is still quite fast.
An offsite backup takes the longest to restore from, but protects against almost all scenarios.
So, the next time you want to impress your coworkers and possibly save the company, ask whether your server or network-attached storage has both backups and redundancy in place.