Backup and Recovery - Zerto

Backup and Recovery

A-to-Zerto Glossary of Terms

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Overview

Backup refers to the copy (or multiple copies) of your organization’s data. When you back up data, you are protecting it from accidents or corruption. Accidents include unwanted events such as deletion; corruption might occur through malware, user error, or software upgrading. Recovery is the process you use to restore backup data.  

What Is Backup and Recovery ?

Backup is an essential part of data management. Think of it like insurance for your data: when you create a backup copy, you are insuring it against loss, corruption, and malware attacks. At its best, the backup copy is a perfect duplicate of your data and is readily accessible when you need it.

Recovery is the process of accessing the backup and restoring any files that have been corrupted or lost. For the recovery to be effective, the backup copy needs to be easily accessible and up to date. At its best, recovery is seamless and quick.

Backup Is Not Replication

Why Is Backup Important?

Without backup, your digital data exists in only one place, such as on a single hard drive or in one instance in the cloud, leaving your data highly vulnerable. One accidental keystroke, one malware attack, or one instance of equipment failure could wipe it all out, much like dropping a sketchbook in a puddle or shredding the wrong stack of papers. Your data is also at risk of corruption, especially during software upgrades or data migrations.

Types of Backup: Select Wisely to Avoid Costly Data Loss

Protecting the Patchwork of SaaS

Why Is Recovery Even More Important?

Having multiple copies of your data is important —as in the 3-2-1 rule—, but the ability to recover as quickly as possible from a disruption is more significant from a business standpoint. A quick recovery is essential whether you are dealing with an entire application, a set of applications, a whole site, or single files. 

The type of recovery needed drives the performance requirements over the recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) metrics. While RPO is influenced by the acceptable data loss for an organization, RTO depends on how much of the recovery process has been automated (instead of manual) and how effectively the recovery plan has been implemented and tested, especially when recovering data and applications consistently to a specific point in time.

Beyond Legacy Backup and DR: It's All About the Recovery

Solve for Backup and Recovery

Because digital data is so vulnerable, backup options have been offered for decades. But older backup technology has some real limitations. The most common type, called snapshot-based backup, takes periodic snapshots of data at saving points throughout a given period, shutting down your system while it creates the backup.

A newer, more advanced backup technology—called journaling technology—lets you replicate data to a secondary site continuously and in real time. The Zerto journal records all your data every few seconds, giving you the lowest RPOs in the industry. 

The Zerto solution also offers orchestration and automation capabilities and has the ability to maintain application consistency over backup and recovery processes, which means you experience minimal downtime with the lowest possible RTOs as well. 

Backup and Recovery with Zerto

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