Backup

Backup refers to the copy­ing of vir­tual files or data­bases to another stor­age device or sys­tem. The pur­pose of back­ups is to pre­serve the saved data.

In case of equip­ment fail­ure, mali­cious code, com­puter crim­i­nals, user errors or other unfore­seen events and cat­a­stro­phes destroy­ing the data, back­ups enable to restore the infor­ma­tion to a pre­vi­ously saved state.

Back­ups cap­ture and syn­chro­nize point-in-time snap­shots and should be applied reg­u­larly to crit­i­cal data­bases and busi­ness appli­ca­tions . How fre­quently back­ups should be cre­ated depends on the type of infor­ma­tion to save, how fast they need to be restored, and the avail­able space at the cho­sen backup media.

Busi­ness best prac­tices sug­gest a full data backup to occur at least once a week, often dur­ing week­ends or off-busi­ness hours. To sup­ple­ment weekly full back­ups , enter­prises typ­i­cally sched­ule a series of dif­fer­en­tial or incre­men­tal data backup jobs that back up only data that has changed since the last full backup took place.