What Is Backup and Recovery
Backup & recovery is the process of creating and storing copies of data that can be used to protect the organization from data loss. This is sometimes called operational recovery. Restoring from a backup usually involves restoring the data to its original location, or to a location that can be used to replace lost or damaged data.
What Is Backup
Backup is the process of creating copies of data to prevent accidental or malicious deletion, damage, hardware failure, ransomware attacks, and other types of data loss. You can create data backups locally, remotely, or both.
What Is Recovery
Recovery is the process of retrieving data from a backup. It means copying data from the backup media to an existing device or a new device. It could also mean copying data from the cloud to a local device, or from one cloud to another.
Why Back up and Recovery Is Important
If your important data is lost due to these things – software or hardware failures, human incidents, data corruption, malicious attacks, and accidental data deletion, the backups can help you recover data from an earlier point in time. Keeping multiple copies of data provides security and flexibility for restoring to a point in time that is not affected by data corruption.
It’s necessary to store a copy of your data on a separate medium to prevent damage or loss. Additional media can be as simple as USB flash drives or external drives, or tape drives, disk storage media, or cloud storage containers, etc.
Besides, disaster recovery is also important since data backup cannot always restore all the data and settings of the system. For example, computer clusters, Active Directory servers, or database servers may require other forms of disaster recovery because backup and recovery may not be able to completely rebuild them.
Types of Backup
There are two main types of database backup – physical backup and logical backup.
1. Physical Backup:
This is a copy of the physical database files, such as data, control files, log files, and archived logs. It is a copy of a file that stores database information in another location and forms the basis of the database recovery mechanism.
2. Logical Backup
It contains logical data extracted from the database, and it consists of tables, procedures, views, functions, etc. However, keeping logical backups alone is not recommended or useful because it only provides structural information.
Besides, data backup can also be divided into two types – tape or disk backup and cloud backup & SaaS backup.
1. Tape or Disk Backup
Since the 1960s, tape backup has been in some form. Today, the tape is still widely used for large-scale enterprise system backup, archiving, and even long-term cloud storage. The main advantages of tape are large capacity, low cost, and remote data backup.
Disk backup appeared in the 1990s and became popular in the early 2000s since it provides faster backup and recovery than tape systems. In addition to the speed of backup and recovery, disk backup also allows you to retrieve individual files without having to restore the entire data set first.
Traditional disk backup solutions can offload data to tape or cloud for disaster recovery. However, recovering large amounts of data from off-site tape or the cloud is slow. With traditional backup methods, the process of recovery may take hours or even days. During this period, business operations have been severely affected.
2. Cloud Backup and Saas Backup
By going directly to the cloud, remote file backups are copied directly to the cloud without local equipment. Cloud-to-cloud backup is the process of copying data from one cloud to another.
SaaS backup refers to backing up data created in SaaS applications such as Microsoft 365 or Google G Suite. Many organizations believe that backups are no longer required because SaaS data resides in the cloud. However, it is not.
Data created in SaaS applications is as vulnerable to accidental or malicious deletion and ransomware attacks as local data. As more and more enterprises migrate workloads to the cloud, backup and recovery in cloud computing are still evolving and will continue to evolve.
What’s more, there are 3 types of backup strategies – full backup, incremental backup, and differential backup.
1. Full backup
The full backup is a basic and complete backup operation that copies all your data to another set of media, such as disk, tape, or CD. Therefore, a complete copy of all data can be used in a single media set. It takes longer to execute and requires a lot of storage space, so it is usually used in combination with differential or incremental backups.
2. Incremental backup
Incremental backup only copies the data that has changed since the last backup operation. The backup application will record and track the time and date of all backup operations. This operation is faster and requires less storage media.
3. Differential backup
Similar to the incremental type, the differential backup will copy all the changed data in the previous set, but each time it runs, it will continue to copy all the data changed since the last full backup.
Types of Recovery
This part is about the types of recovery.
1. File Restore
File restore is the process of replacing one or more missing files from a backup to the original or new location.
2. Volume Restore
Volume restore retrieves files and folders with full permissions and is used to restore a large number of files when the bare-metal restore is not required.
3. Bare-Metal Restore
Bare-mental restore is the process of restoring the entire system image (data, applications, settings, and operating system of the protected machine) from a backup to a new physical server. “Bare metal” refers to the unused and unconfigured hardware of the new system. When the main server fails, becomes damaged, or otherwise fails to run, the bare-metal restore will be used.
4. Local Virtualization
Local virtualization is a feature of the BCDR (Business continuity and disaster recovery) solution that can provide rapid recovery of business operations. Local virtualization uses hypervisor technology to start the virtual server from a snapshot on the backup device. This enables enterprises to resume normal business operations while restoring the main server.
5. Cloud Virtualization
Cloud virtualization refers to the process described above, but in the cloud rather than on a local backup device. Some BCDR solutions can create a three-level cloud copy of the backup server image. If both the primary server and the backup server cannot run, for example, because of fire or flood, business operations can continue on the cloud backup server image.
How to Do the Backup and Recovery
After gaining the information about the definition, importance, types of backup & recovery. Then, we will introduce how to do the backup and recovery. To keep Windows 10 PC data safe, it’s highly recommended that you back up your data on Windows computers to a different location. Once the data is lost, you can use the backup to restore the data.
Speaking of backup and recovery, MiniTool ShadowMaker is a great tool for you. The following are some main features of this program.
- It can back up OS, individual files and folders, hard disks and partitions to hard drive, external hard drive, USB drive, network drive, etc.
- It offers two methods for data protection: backup and sync. These two methods both support automatic backup and schedule backup.
- You can use this free Windows recovery tool to restore Windows 10 system to a previous state from an external drive by using a backup when needed.
- You can also do the universal restore when restoring to a different computer with dissimilar hardware.
Backup
Let’s see how to back up your data with MiniTool ShadowMaker.
Step 1: Download and install it on your Windows computer.
MiniTool ShadowMaker TrialClick to Download100%Clean & Safe
Step 2: Choose Keep Trial. After entering its main interface, go to the Backup page. Then click the Source module to choose the backup source. As for data backup, please choose Folders and Files to continue and choose the files you want to back up.
Step 3: Returning to the Backup page, click the Destination module to select the destination path to save the backup image. It is recommended to choose an external hard drive.
Step 4: After having successfully selected the backup source and destination, you can click Back up Now to perform the data backup action immediately.
When the process is finished, you have successfully backed up files and have protected your data.
Restore
Then, let’s see how to restore data with MiniTool ShadowMaker.
Step 1: After entering the main interface, please go to the Manage page.
Step 2: Then you will find the backups are listed here. If no, you can click the Add Backup button to add it to here.
Step 3: Click the Menu button on the right side, and then you will get the context menu.
Step 4: In the context menu, click Browse or Restore. Next, you are required to select the backup version. Then click Next.
Step 5: In the pop-up window, you can expand the folder and choose the individual file to restore. Then click Next.
Step 6: Next, choose a location to save the restored file. Then click Next. The selective file restore process will begin. When the process is finished, you can click OK and Finish. Then close MiniTool ShadowMaker.
When you have finished all steps, you have successfully restored the individual file. You can find that it is convenient to recover files from a specific folder with MiniTool ShadowMaker.
In addition to MiniTool ShadoaMaker, the MiniTool team also has another recovery software – MiniTool Power Data Recovery.
You can use MiniTool Power Data Recovery to easily recover permanently deleted documents, videos, photos, audios, etc. from Windows PC or laptop, SD/memory card, USB flash/pen drive, external hard drive, solid-state drive, etc. If you have lost some data you need, you can use this program to easily restore them.
MiniTool Power Data Recovery features an intuitive interface and simple operation. It is clean and free and lets you recover data in 3 simple steps.
MiniTool Power Data Recovery TrialClick to Download100%Clean & Safe
Step 1. Launch MiniTool Power Data Recovery. Choose a device category and select the target location or drive in the right window.
Step 2. You can choose the file type you want to scan and recover by clicking Settings. Then click the Scan button on the main interface to start scanning.
Step 3. When the scan finishes, you can check the scan result to find your data, check them, and click the Save button. Continue to choose a new location to store the recovered videos.
Bottom Line
To sum up, you have known what backup and recovery is and how to do the backup and recovery. In addition, if you have any different ideas of backup and recovery, you can share them in the comment zone, or please feel free to contact us via email [email protected] and we will reply to you as soon as possible.
About The Author
Position: Columnist
Having been an editor at MiniTool since graduating college as an English major, Daisy specializes in writing about data backups, disk cloning, and file syncing as well as general computer knowledge and issues. In her free time, Daisy enjoys running and going with friends to the amusement park.