Chapter 12. Backup and Recovery

A backup is a copy of production data, created and retained for the sole purpose of recovering deleted or corrupted data. With growing business and regulatory demands for data storage, retention, and availability, organizations are faced with the task of backing up an ever-increasing amount of data. This task becomes more challenging as demand for consistent backup and quick restore of data increases throughout the enterprise — which may be spread over multiple sites. Moreover, organizations need to accomplish backup at a lower cost with minimum resources.

Organizations must ensure that the right data is in the right place at the right time. Evaluating backup technologies, recovery, and retention requirements for data and applications is an essential step to ensure successful implementation of the backup and recovery solution. The solution must facilitate easy recovery and retrieval from backups and archives as required by the business.

This chapter includes details about the purposes of backup, strategies for backup and recovery operations, backup methods, the backup architecture, and backup media.

Backup Purpose

Backups are performed to serve three purposes: disaster recovery, operational backup, and archival.

Disaster Recovery

Backups can be performed to address disaster recovery needs. The backup copies are used for restoring ...

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