The Great Backup Thread?

Posted: Tue Sep 07, 2010 1:06 am

This is work in progress. And is to be considered a rough draft, thank you!

Anyone who uses computers on a regular basis, has suffered data loss. When the amount of the data loss becomes so great, an individual will generally opt to implement some kind of backup system to prevent this from happening. Just because you backup your data does not prevent you from losing your data, it improves your chances at recovering your data.

There are a few terms you will likely run into, here are some of them.

Redundancy - unlike most scenarios where redundancy is a bad thing, with regard to data it is a great thing. Redundancy is a term that is used to describe your backup systems ability to suffer a system or hardware failure, while maintaining a backup of your data. For instance, you have a single external HDD to backup your data to, which fails. You still have your main computer so there is some redundancy. As the value of your data increases so should the redundancy of your backup system.

Local backup/Off site backup - These two terms are used to differentiate the location of your backup system. Local backup is something that is available in the house or building you are in for example. This could be a CD/DVD or an external HDD, and can be used in case of accidental deletion, a virus, corrupted file or various other forms of data loss. An off site backup is one that is kept away from your home or building. This is used to recover your data from a serious loss of data, such as occurs in a fire, or flood.

Raid/Raid array - Often times when the backup systems are discussed you will hear mention of the term raid. There are many types of raid, which is used to describe a hardware or software controlled group of HDDs that can act as a single or multiple disks. In a raid 1 for instance, you have 2 HDD's physically installed (this forms your raid array), the data is written to a disk in the array while at the same time it is copied (mirrored) on to the second disk in the array. The raid array consists of 2 HDD but the Operating system (Windows, Mac OS, Linux*) sees the raid array as a single disk. This offers redundancy, in that if a single HDD fails, you still have a HDD with your data on it.

Note: Just because you still have your data, does not mean that you did not suffer data loss.