What are backup and disaster recovery?
Disaster Recovery and backup is a way to reduce and recover from natural or human-made disasters which involves various tools and procedures to enable the recovery or continuation of important technology infrastructure and systems.
Disaster recovery focuses on the IT or technology systems that support various critical business functions by securing and keeping all essential aspects of a business functioning despite significant disruptive events. Disaster recovery and backup can be considered an important subset of business continuity.
The Disaster Recovery and backup process assume that the primary site is not recoverable or will take time to recover and thus represents a process of restoring data and services to a secondary or alternate site that has survived.
Backup in itself means to keep the data backed up in a safe and secure place to ensure continuity of business and its processes in times of disaster.
When combined together, data backup and recovery make a set of tools that ensure the continuity of business functions in a timely manner in the situation of disaster.
List of data recovery solutions that are the most effective alternative for disaster recovery backup.
Prior to the Digital revolution, data was backed up mostly in physical form such as papers, files, etc. This type of data was extremely vulnerable to being lost, destroyed, etc. after that came hard drives, pen drives, etc, which were prone to virus and malware attacks.
To avoid all these complications, many companies came up with the idea of cloud storage. The following are some of the various solutions that are being used for data recovery.
Following are some of the most useful and reputed tools used for disaster recovery and the recovery of lost and corrupted data.
Best Backup and Disaster Recovery Solutions
EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard
It is the best data recovery software on the market for multiple purposes. It is available for Mac or Windows, this capable tool enables the user to completely recover lost files, pictures, documents and videos, whether they’ve disappeared due to accidental deletion, formatting, partition loss, OS crash, virus attack, or a range of other data loss scenarios.
Acronis Data Recovery
This data recovery tool has a wide application in terms of being used throughout multiple devices. It is more robust than EaseUs and has a wider application.
Describing itself as “the world’s fastest backup and recovery solution for stable, secure business continuity”, Acronis offers fine-tuned control over data location, authenticity and integrity.
Stellar Data Recovery Professional
This is a good file recovery option for home and business use, with an easy to use interface, it lets the user preview what files they want to restore.
Recuva Pro
This tool comes from the makers of the age-old file-cleaning tool CCleaner. This tool is one of the cheapest file recovery tools around at the moment. This tool helps the user to recover data from virtual hard drives as well as physical ones.
Recuva Pro is very easy to use and performs all the standard file recovery tasks efficiently. It’s only available for Windows devices.
Prosoft Data Rescue 5
This a much costlier tool on the market with a wide set of uses and its price is justified by its ability to restore the most difficult of data.
Why do you need a data backup and disaster recovery plan?
Many users often ignore the data backup and recovery process. Some might just ignore it whereas others might not think of it. Taking into consideration the number of cyber-attacks and malware and viruses moving about in the online world, one needs to understand and take this topic seriously. Following are some of the reasons why a solid data backup and disaster recovery plan needs to be set in place.
- Broad range of threats:
Wherever there is data, there are threats always present to that data. Data is a valuable component of running any business and it is open to a number of threats that might lead to data leaks and data loss. These threats might be physical device damage, human threats, technical threats and natural disasters.
A user might have done something to protect the device, but, a proper data backup and disaster recovery plan should be kept in place.
- Security measures fail:
No matter how strong and considered the security measures, they can always fail, letting in viruses and malware into the system that can harm the business or person's devices and data. Many viruses are so designed that when the file gets corrupted, you need to pay the cybercriminals in order to retrieve your data.
This however is highly recommended to be avoided because there is no guarantee that after paying the ransom your data would be recovered. With the proper backup and disaster recovery plan, you can secure your data in the cloud where you can retrieve uninfected versions of the data that was taken, and restore it to a new device, or your old, cleaned one.
- Productivity losses
If an organization relies heavily on data to run the business, then its productivity will suffer if that data is lost. The longer the data goes without being recovered or restored, the longer the employees and the organization as a whole will be unable to perform. When this happens, profits can suffer as a result.
- Costs
Trying to recover the lost data at the last minute can become overly expensive. However, by planning and preparing ahead for the possibility of data loss, you can act quickly without having to sacrifice a substantial budget to the recovery process, and with fewer productivity-related losses.
With a plan in hand, you can always limit the length of time your business is affected by data loss, or any other data-related disaster, and therefore can limit the scope of the damage.
- Permanent data loss
Without a data backup and disaster recovery plan, you might be unable to ever retrieve the data that was lost. The ability to retrieve the data greatly relies on the actions you have taken to fortify that data for retrieval.
This includes the creation of data backups on physical storage devices, where they are still vulnerable to any number of the threats listed above, but also with a cloud backup service so that they may be retrieved quickly and efficiently, no matter how they were lost or altered in the first place.
CONCLUSION
Businesses can always protect themselves and others in the organization from these damages and dangers and restore the data quickly after any data loss event by having the right data backup and disaster recovery plan in place.
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Top 6 Types of Disaster Recovery Sites Explained
Cloud Data Warehouse Modernization: Its Advantages & Mistakes to Avoid
