What is your Company’s backup routine?

A backup or a security copy is an essential activity for guaranteeing the availability of digitalized data. In this manner, a routine of automatized coping of data for backup servers or external media are created. Therefore, it will be possible to perform the recovery of information in case of incidents.

Attacks such as the ransomware types keep growing. Many companies have found themselves as hostages of virtual criminals that encrypt stored data in their own servers. Subsequently, such criminals will charge a ransom in virtual currencies in order to return the access. One of the responses to such kind of attack is exactly possessing the backup of the data that have been encrypted.

Here we have listed an example in which the backup can be considered mandatory. However, there are several other scenarios where your Company might need a backup. As well as, accidental exclusion of files, disaster recovery, among others.

Before such an overview we will recall some important concepts about Backup.

TYPES OF BACKUPS

Thinking about backups for a small volume of data might be simple. It is enough to copy the files and saving them in external media. However, when it comes to bigger environments, having a well-defined strategy becomes imperative.

Full

As the name suggests, it is the complete copy of all the files. Therefore, this modality offers the best protection in relation to the loss of data. However, because it needs to deploy a large volume of data, it is the most time-consuming and expensive modality. Primarily, because of the high consumption of resources such as the storage space of the copied data, capacity of processing and the usage of the network.

Based on this scenario, despite being important, creating routines only for completed backups could be unfeasible for the infrastructure of the Company. The best solution could be the integration of the complete backup with other modalities such as the ones cited below.

Incremental

The incremental backup has been planned to avoid copying all the files per each process. Generating, in this manner, the economy of resources. This modality could be implemented after the first completed backup. Thus, the incremental backup will only copy the amended data since the latest backup event (namely incremental or completed).

The incremental backup will store backup fragments. With this, generating a much more cost-effective process in relation to the complete copy. Especially for being faster and occupying less storage space. However, it is important to emphasize that a large series of incremental backups without interspacing with full backups might generate a great difficulty when recovering data. Considering that in the recovery, it will be necessary to retrieve the last full backup and adding all the incremental fragments.

Differential

The differential backup can be an intermediate solution. In this manner, it is not as agile as the incremental and not so expensive as the complete one. After the first full backup, every differential backup will only copy the data that were modified since the last complete backup. In other words, the reference to the differential backup is not the last event of backup, but it is the latest event of full backup.

Given this scenario, the bigger the sequence of differential backups, the greater will be the amount of files to be copied. However, the process of recovery will be facilitated in relation to the incremental. Therefore, for a full recovery, it is enough to recover the last full backup and the last differential backup.

WINDOWS OF BACKUPS

As it has been mentioned previously, the creation of a backup routine is crucial. However, a constant concern is the usage of resources. Besides a good scheduling in relation to the backup modality to be used, it is important to choose the timetables for the processes to be executed.

Imagine carrying out a complete backup during the business hours? The damage can be big to the point of causing interruptions of services that will dispute network and hardware resources. Since this backup process will generate a high load.

In the face of such scenarios, it is important to certify that the backup processes, besides functioning correctly, are being executed during the correct windows of time. That is to say, guaranteeing that the backup is being carried out outside of the business hours.

With the TRAFip it will be possible to create alarms which will monitor the backup servers. Therefore, in case a network activity is registered that can be compatible to the backup process, the IT team will be informed readily. In this manner, being capable of anticipating the problems that the situation could generate.

Do you want to learn more? In the link below we teach you how to configure an alarm to detect backup activity during business hours.

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

TRAFip is a system of traffic analysis which allows the determining of what, how, when, where and by whom your network is being utilized.

In this way, there are no doubts about the importance of investing on network management. In this same manner, bringing not only benefits to the network visibility but also being a complementary way to seek for the prevention of problems that might cause the dropping of network services.

Thinking of that, Telcomanager present in the market since 2002, and a leading Latin America brand in the sector of software for managing networks. Also counting with a unique and innovative technology, deploying smart solutions in the monitoring of data that will provide a stratified vision of the traffic, is now allowing your Company to follow the most important aspects of your network, in real time.