Back up strategies

Back up strategy is the planned and well-organized data protection using a backup policy that authorizes the backup responsibilities to the most appropriate and right persons or offices and also sets the duplication time cycles. In other words, it is the action of copying physical or virtual documents or files into a secondary data file to act as a security or bank of preservation to ensure that even if the original file gets lost, their data will be restored. Every IT officer ion any company understands the vitality of having a backup for all the necessary information and data in the office. He also understands the necessity of ability to retrieve or restore the data (Hutchinson Et al, 1999). Our computers and systems may experience system outage, hardware failure, natural disaster or other instances of data loss. Attempts to back up ones data started ages ago even before the invention of electronic technology. Even though, electronic technology has been improving day in day out in a more sophisticated way.  Today we have many methods that we can use for backing up our data as discussed below.

Use of external hard drive: These technologies have been in use for quite some time and it has been very helpful in backing up data and information. They come in different sizes, strategies, shapes and have different storage capacities.  All these types of hard drives work in the same manner and experience the same shortcomings and merits. Many of them come with backup software that is compatible with windows and other third-party backup software. It is very fast and convenient especially when backing up larger data. It is portable and not easily affected by the worms. The only disadvantage that is alarming is the initial cost of the hard drives.

Network storage:  the use of Network Attached Storage (NAS) has become very rampant in many businesses today. The only big issue with NAS is that its initial cost is very high. In comparison, it’s more effective because one NAS can be used to secure data for all the computers in an office instead of buying many hard discs for all the computers.  On the other hand, not all the windows version is compatible with NAS.

Cloud backup strategies: This is a strategy that is becoming so popular in the recent technology. It involves sending a copy of the files over an internet platform to an offsite server. The cloud backups are controlled by the company and charge an agreed fee either monthly or annually. The provider gives you a certain capacity depending on the much you pay for. Retrieving the files from the internet depends on the speed and the strength of the internet available thus making it slower than other methods (Ofek, Cakeljic and Gagne, 2002). The good thing about the cloud back up is the accessibility. With other strategies like hard drives, if you forget or misplace them, then accessing the data will not be possible. With cloud storage, the data can be retrieved anywhere any time provided there is internet and a computer gadget

References

Hutchinson, N. C., Manley, S., Federwisch, M., Harris, G., Hitz, D., Kleiman, S., & O’Malley, S. (1999, February). Logical vs. physical file system backup. In OSDI (Vol. 99, pp. 239-249).

Ofek, Y., Cakeljic, Z., & Gagne, M. (2002). U.S. Patent No. 6,397,308. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Y.Ueno, N.Miyaho, and S.Suzuki, 2009, “Disaster Recovery Mechanism using Widely Distributed Networking and Secure Metadata Handling Technology”, Proceedings of the 4th edition of the UPGRADE-CN workshop, pp. 45-48.

Vijaykumar Javaraiah, Brocade Advanced Networks, and Telecommunication Systems (ANTS), 2011, “Backup for Cloud and Disaster Recovery for Consumers and SMBs,” IEEE 5th International Conference, 2011.

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