What Is Backup and Restore?

What Is Backup and Restore?

Backup and restore is the practice of copying your data periodically so that you may restore it in the wake of a power outage, cyberattack, or other disruption. From snapshots to mirroring, there are many ways for a business to meet its recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs).

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) vs. Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

How you back up your data and applications matters. It’s about finding the disaster recovery strategy that helps you meet your RTOs and RPOs. So what are they? Here’s a quick breakdown:

• RTO: The maximum time your business can afford to lose access to the data that powers your apps and operations. It determines how quickly you need your system to recover. 
• RPO: Refers to the maximum amount of data you can afford to lose. Use this to determine the frequency of your backups.

RTO and RPO are the key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll want to be aware of when building your disaster recovery strategy.

Strategies for Backup and Restore

Beyond RTO and RPO, you’ll also want to consider factors such as security, scalability, technology, and budget when choosing the right backup and recovery solution for your needs. Depending on the technologies and resources available to your organisation, you may need to employ one or more of these backup techniques as part of a larger disaster recovery strategy. Common backup methods include:

• Full-image backup: You back up the full image of your data to create a restore point you can instantly roll back to. Because you’re performing a full backup, this technique takes the longest to store.
• Differential backup: Backs up all changes since the last full-image backup. Restoration only requires two files: the last full-image backup, followed by the most recent differential backup. 
• Incremental backup: You incrementally back up changes since the last full-image restore point. After a set number of incremental backups, the cycle completes with a full-image backup. Restoration starts with the last full-image backup, followed by incremental backups to the target RPO. 
• Real-time backup: Also called a continuous backup, this method involves instantly copying every change to your data to a separate storage device. It provides the most granular and comprehensive backup.

Instant recovery: A continuously updated backup virtual machine (VM) is maintained for a production VM. When the production VM fails, the backup instantly takes over, yielding zero RTO and zero RPO.

How Pure Storage Rapid Restore is Modernising Disaster Recovery

Legacy storage solutions are woefully ill-equipped to handle the scale and speed required of modern data operations. In a world where organisations increasingly demand the strictest RTOs and RPOs, legacy infrastructure becomes the primary bottleneck in disaster recovery.

Pure Storage® FlashBlade® delivers Rapid Restore for production and dev/test workloads with up to 270TB/hr of data-recovery performance. Key benefits include:

• Accelerated recovery for Tier 1 dev/test environments, analytics, IT sandboxes, and backups
• Faster database backups for Oracle RMAN, Microsoft SQL Server, and MySQL
• Built-in protection against ransomware with SafeMode snapshots

FlashBlade Rapid Restore delivers modern data protection at speed and scale to help your organisation hit your RTO and RPO goals.