Tailor-Made Service From One Of The Best Data Backup Companies In Johannesburg
Our data recovery services are specifically geared towards business continuity and cloud disaster recovery. Our method is to backup your data according to a fixed schedule which is agreed upon on the signing of our 99% SLA.
Any data backup for small businesses comes with a standard 24-hour backup schedule, however, if more frequent data storage is needed, this will be outlined by your company and we will put the necessary measures in place to meet that need. We can recover deleted files easily through one of our hosted servers, and if there is any sort of power outage or another system-wide catastrophe, we have advanced IT services in place such as automatic failover systems, to redirect your entire digital operations to a replicated server with the exact same environment.
This means there’s no downtime between an error happening and your system responding. You will be redirected near-instantly and continue with whatever actions you were busy with, as most replicated software has an auto-refresh function built-in, particularly because it’s on the cloud.
Disaster Recovery Services Backed By A 99% SLA.
The Difference Between Data Backup And Disaster Recovery Services
The easiest way to differentiate the two is to think of it in the form of a hardware analogy. Imagine that data is backed up on a PC and then that PC breaks. The data was not backed up in any external way and is essentially lost and unusable. For the data to be of any use, the hard drive needs to be removed, inserted into a new PC, and made compatible with the system so that it can work.
On the other hand, a cloud disaster recovery situation would be the data being backed up on a separate PC so that if the first one breaks, there is an immediate replacement, and work can continue without any downtime.
With cloud computing the above is easily achieved through server hosting or server replication, done for your entire workforce. Measures are set up throughout your network for remote data recovery such that files stored on a shared network drive (which is a server in itself), are backed-up offsite for a) automatic failover and b) tertiary backup (at a site which is separate from the offsite backup facility, hence thrice removed) in case any of the primary backups fail.
The 4 Types of Cloud Backup Solutions You Could Use
The type of data backup management plans you choose will depend on the severity of the crisis that you’re facing in your IT infrastructure and whether or not you can afford to have downtime. There are four common types of backup:
1. Full Backups – This is the most basic and complete type of file recovery option. The data is usually copied in its entirety to an external storage medium such as a hard disk. By copying all the data to one medium, you can easily have it available in case of business data recovery, reducing the restoration time to its minimum, a measurement known as ‘recovery time objective’. This is the estimated time to restore a system to acceptable levels of operation.
2. Incremental Backups – This backup involves only copying the data that has changed since the last backup operation. The benefit of this type of backup is that it will usually involve copying less data than a full backup because you won’t be updating your digital assets wholesale every time. It is a more practical way of backing up data and preparing for file recovery. A version history has to be carefully tracked to know what was modified and when in order to back it up appropriately. Usually, the 24-hour scheduled backup will be an incremental backup. And then a broader, system-wide, full backup can occur during moments of extended downtime, such as weekends.
Recover Deleted Files With Minimal Downtime.
3. Differential Backups – A differential backup is similar to an incremental backup because it copies all data which has changed from the previous remote data backup. But where this one changes is that every time it runs, it copies all the data which has changed since the last full backup. This is a safer form of incremental backup, in essence, and can be illustrated by the simple example:
A full backup was performed at time (T). Since then 3 things have changed. When a differential backup runs, it will copy those 3 changes.
The next day, 6 things change. When the differential backup runs again, it will now copy 3 + 6 things, which is the difference in change since time (T), not the difference since that day alone. So a total of 9 things will be copied.
It takes more time because essentially, it’s duplicating some data, but it’s safer in the long haul for version control and data backup recovery. It will also still take fewer resources and time than a full backup.
4. Mirror Backups – This is similar to a full backup because it’s an exact copy of the source dataset. Only the latest version of the source data is stored on the server backup cloud. This will often include the backups created of the source data. So, a mirror backup can be used as a ‘final straw’ backup if all else fails because it will give you fast recovery time and access to all your data at once. Mirroring requires a large amount of storage space, and costs substantially more, and is usually not necessary for most organisations.
Ultimately, you will want to follow a tried-and-trusted rule in backing up your data: 3-2-1.
Three copies of the data, two hosted as backups on two different cloud servers (one failover and one a normal backup), and then a tertiary backup, which is offsite to the premises of the other two server-hosted backups.