Backups and Data Recovery - Week 7

Backups and Data Recovery

Backup Strategy

Backups are essential to store data and retrieve lost information in case of a disaster, like your system crashing or a cyber-attack. A good backup strategy to consider would be a differential backup strategy, which is a combination of scheduled weekly or monthly full backups (depending on the importance of data or size of the organization) along with incremental daily backups. This strategy only backs up the data that has changed since the last full backup. 

Ideally, we would be storing our backups both locally and remotely, like in the cloud or on a suitable storage medium, such as a hard disk drive (HDD) or a Network-Attached Storage (NAS), depending on the need of accessibility of the data.

Its important to regularly test the backups to verify its integrity and accessibility for when we do need it. Data can become corrupt while performing the backup or when it has been stored for too long. 

Some methods of recovering lost data include:

Recycle bin - Usually when files are deleted are just temporarily deleted and can be found in the recycle bin.

Restoring Previous Version - File history in Windows and Time Machine in Mac allow you to retrieve files to their previous versions from backups.

Commercial Data Recovery Software - Stellar offers data recovery services allowing you to scan storage media to recover deleted files, it allows you to scan different locations, file types, and more.