Data backup, in Information Technology (IT), is referred to the process of copying their data into an archive file with an intention to refer or use it at a later stage, in the event of temporary data

Data backup, in Information Technology (IT), is referred to the process of copying their data into an archive file with an intention to refer or use it at a later stage, in the event of temporary data misplacement or permeant data loss. Considering that data backups are a kind of insurance against data disasters, every organization needs to prepare their own data backup strategies and develop backup systems and tools. Organizations either opt for on-premise backup systems or remote backup systems depending upon their size and requirements. Similarly, organizations consider the backup solutions such as a full backup, or an incremental backup, or differential backup systems depending on their organization's needs.

I would like to discuss the queer case of how redundant data backup luckily protected a human error. During the filming of Toy Story 2, an accidental click deleted the entire animation files, thereby erasing an entire year’s worth of efforts. There was no hope and future for the film without the deleted files, and for their luck, Galyn Susman, their supervising technical director had made a copy of the entire film and saved on her home computer, as she was a soon to be a mother and wished to work from home. Hence, the film was saved, and their efforts didn’t go waste.

The above example clearly shows the significance of backups for any firm. Understanding that in today’s digital age, data is generated, processed, stored, and shared in large quantities, data backups and recovery techniques form a crucial part of an organization’s data protection strategies. According to Singh (2012), organizations need to look for a reliable computing platform which can support an efficient data backup and data recovery systems to enable them in collecting the information from their backup servers in case of data breaches. Singh believes the offsite backup services need necessarily protect the privacy of the user, data security, reliability, besides should be cost-effective. According to Chervenak et al. (1998), in the competitive world of business where the file systems keep growing, the most suitable backup techniques to handle the growing size of files are incremental-only  backup technique, device-based backup technique to eliminate redundancy, copy-on-write, snapshots, compressing the data before backing up, and automated generation of off-site backup files.

References

Chervenak, A. L., Vellanki, V., & Kurmas, Z. (1998). Protecting File Systems: A Survey of Backup Techniques. In Sixth Goddard Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies in cooperation with the Fifteenth IEEE Symposium on Mass Storage Systems (pp. 17-32). Greenbelt, MD: Goddard Space Flight Center.

DB Technologies. (2017, August 09). Toy Story 2 Case Study: Data Backup & Disaster Recovery. Retrieved March 26, 2019, from https://dbtechnologies.com.au/toy-story-2-disaster-recovery-case-study/

& Singh, K. R. (2012). Online Data Back-up and Disaster Recovery Techniques in Cloud Computing: A Review. International Journal of Engineering and Innovative Technology, 2(5), 249-254.