The purpose of a backup is to ensure that you have a useful copy of important data from a computer, or a network of computers, in a different location. This allows a company or an individual to recover information if data is lost.
Data can be lost due to accidents, incidents, or computer breakdowns, for example as a result of a disaster, such as flood or if information has accidently been deleted.
To illustrate, if you had a long hand written document lying around on your desk at home and somehow, perhaps due to a fire, the document was destroyed, you would of course need to re-write it and replicate many hundreds of hours of effort. If on the other hand, you had regularly taken a photocopy and left that in a safe place, such as a fire-proof safe or in another physical location, you could refer back to the copy if the original was lost. The ‘backup’ would be the copy and the ‘recovery’ would enable you to refer to that copy and continue working on the document.
The downside of course is that unless you make a copy at the end of every day, you would still loose some information. Naturally, even if you hadn’t made a copy for a few days you would at least only have to re-write the work that hadn’t been duplicated and not the whole document.
This illustration works for technology to. It is possible to take a daily backup or at the very least a weekly backup of all your important data. There is naturally a cost attached to this i.e. the more regularly you backup the higher the cost in terms of storage and effort required, but if you have critical information, then this can be well worth the price.
Backup & Recovery as a technology is business critical and this is evidenced by the fact that the market is saturated by many vendors who often compete with each other for business. Symantec are one of the biggest known vendors but the choice for end customers seems to grow by the day. Vendors like Acronis, EMC, CA, Double Take Software provide more traditional backup solutions whilst the growth in online backup is met by vendors like Mamut, Backup Direct and Risc Group serving the SME sector. Finally there is the growth of Cloud based backup services [SaaS] serviced by the likes of Microsoft, Resolutions MSP, Backup Direct etc.