Monday, April 30, 2012

Differences between disaster recovery and back-up

By Nicole Sarson


Disaster recovery and data back-ups are not the same thing, although it is surprising how many people don't realise this. There are a few key differences between them, which you may not know unless you have used either a disaster recovery strategy or data back-up plan before.

In order to determine the differences between them, let's look at what disaster recovery and data back-ups are and how they work. Data back-ups, to start with, are designed to restore files, groups of files or other data that has been lost or deleted from a system that is mainly functional.

If you need to restore application software, hardware, operating systems or even whole machines after a major failure, however, you will need to have a disaster recovery strategy in place. Whether it is a natural disaster like a flood or an earthquake, or a man-induced problem such as a hazardous material spill or an infrastructure failure, a disaster recovery strategy will be able to restore your critical systems, and quickly.

You should now be able to see the main difference between data back-up and disaster recovery. You can recover lost files and data with a back-up plan, but you will need a disaster recovery strategy in place to recover a full system.

You may want to consider implementing both a data back-up plan and a disaster recovery strategy within your company. After all, you will not be able to restore lost data from your back-ups if you do not have a working system in the first place. If your computer systems do go down permanently, you could be waiting up to a week to get new ones installed and running, and only after this has been done will your back-ups prove themselves useful.

Both disaster recovery and back-ups, and the differences between them, should now be clearer to you. However, if you still need help, make sure you speak to a data protection specialist.




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