“Backup” and “Disaster Recovery” are Related, But Not Synonymous

If you’ve spent any amount of time around us, you’ve probably had the importance of data backup and disaster recovery preparation preached to you—probably more than once. However, as closely associated as the two are, they are not the same. Let’s explore the critical differences between these two processes so you can be fully prepared to attend to both.

What Separates Data Backup and Disaster Recovery?

As IT professionals, it sometimes surprises us how many people and businesses conflate these two terms. While related, the two terms refer to different parts of overall business continuity preparations.

Data backup is the creation of distinct and isolated copies of your data so that—should something happen to your original copy—you have spares to fall back on. Disaster recovery is the act of restoring operations after some interruption has taken place, which could very well involve restoring lost data from the aforementioned data backup.

This makes both factors necessary for a business to maintain its continuity, particularly when faced with a disaster of any kind.

Food for Thought Regarding Data Backup

When preparing your data backup, you need to determine what data is most critical to your operations and is therefore crucial to back up. While all data should be preserved if at all possible, prioritizing that which you’ll need in order to operate, but including as much as you can without it impacting your successful restoration of it is best. In order to avoid user error leading to lost data, your data backups should be automated.

Food for Thought Regarding Disaster Recovery

It’s important to remember that the goal of any disaster recovery process is to get your business back to an acceptable level of operations as efficiently as possible. To accomplish this, there are a few practices that are critical to follow regarding your backups. For example, best practices state that you maintain at least three up-to-date copies of your data, stored in at least two storage media, one of which is housed offsite—ideally, in the cloud. Your disaster recovery process also needs to be stress tested to ensure that it is reliable enough to serve you if need be. 

If you need assistance in implementing the kind of data backup and disaster recovery strategy that you can rely on, we offer a service that delivers just that. Our all-inclusive Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) service acts as a preventative solution to protect your business from disaster. Give us a call at (703) 821-8200 today to learn more.