Ronald Caldwell Storage and backups are critical for companies of all sizes. After all, accidental data loss cost companies an average of $4.88 million in 2024.
Data disasters can result from human error, hardware issues, power failure, natural disasters, and more. In any case, safeguarding against data loss events will save you time, money, and a loss of reputation. The recovery efforts and potential legal issues that result from such a crisis can have a serious impact on your bottom line.
When your business runs on servers, data backup and recovery are crucial elements of your business’s survival.
Let’s look at the risks you need to start assessing.
Key Points
- Data backup is creating copies of information, while data recovery is the process of restoring that information after a loss event.
- Only 10% of companies back up their data daily, leaving most businesses vulnerable to significant data loss.
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) are critical metrics that determine how quickly you need to recover and how much data loss is acceptable.
- Effective backup strategies typically include a combination of full, incremental, and differential backups depending on business needs.
- Automated monitoring and testing ensure your backup and recovery systems will function properly when needed most.
What is data backup and recovery?
A data backup is a copy of your digital information. Data recovery is how you get that information back to normal after a crisis.
Data backup and data recovery, while interconnected, serve distinct purposes. Data backup involves copying and archiving information to safeguard it against loss or corruption. This involves regularly saving copies of data at intervals that suit the business’s needs.
Data recovery is the method of restoring this data from the backups when an incident occurs, such as system failure or data corruption. For example, if a server fails, data recovery uses the most recent backup to restore lost information, ideally minimizing downtime and data loss.
Data backups enable successful recovery by letting you quickly restore your systems back to where they were before the crisis. But that’s limited by how recently you’ve backed that data up — if you restore your systems to the state they were in a week ago, you’d be missing a week’s worth of work!
Why data backup and recovery is important
Data backup and recovery is not just a technical necessity—it’s a critical business function that protects your organization’s most valuable assets. Understanding its importance helps prioritize these systems in your IT strategy and budget.
Data backup and recovery is essential for:
- Preventing permanent data loss when systems fail
- Reducing the financial impact of data disasters
- Maintaining business continuity during crises
- Protecting sensitive information from being compromised
Difference between backup and recovery
While often discussed together, backup and recovery are distinct processes with different timing, strategies, and resource requirements.
| Criteria | Backups | Recovery |
| Timing and preparation | Proactive and preventative, performed regularly during normal operations. | Reactive, only implemented when data loss or corruption has occurred. |
| Strategy and planning | Requires planning for storage capacity, frequency, and retention policies. | Demands incident response protocols and prioritization of critical systems. |
| Resources required | Consumes bandwidth and storage resources but minimal staff intervention when automated. | Often requires significant IT staff time and may involve specialized recovery tools. |
| Success metrics | success is measured by completion rates, verification tests, and storage efficiency. | Success is measured by speed of restoration, minimal data loss, and system functionality. |
Understanding these differences helps organizations develop comprehensive data protection strategies that address both routine backup operations and emergency recovery scenarios.
Types of data recovery
When data loss occurs, the approach to recovery depends on what was lost, how it was lost, and how quickly you need it back. Understanding the different types of data recovery helps you choose the right solution for your specific situation.
Data recovery generally falls into two categories: logical and physical. Logical recovery addresses software-related issues like accidental deletion or corruption, while physical recovery deals with hardware damage like drive failures or electrical problems.
Tools like Recuva, Stellar, and EaseUS can help with logical recovery, while physical recovery often requires professional services with specialized equipment in controlled environments. Let’s explore the different recovery methods available:
Immediate recovery solutions
When every minute of downtime costs your business, these recovery methods provide the fastest path to operational status:
- Instant VM recovery: Allows you to boot a virtual machine directly from the backup storage, bypassing the need to restore data to production storage first.
- Volume mounts: Temporarily mount backup data as a drive volume, providing quick access to specific files without full restoration.
- Granular file recovery: Extracts individual files or folders from a backup without restoring the entire system.
- Database recovery: Specialized recovery for database systems that can restore to a specific transaction point.
Complete system recovery
When entire systems are compromised or lost, these comprehensive recovery approaches restore full functionality:
- Bare metal recovery: Rebuilds an entire system from scratch on new or repaired hardware, including the operating system, applications, and data
- Full system restoration: Restores all system components, settings, and data to a previous functioning state
- OS recovery: Reinstalls or repairs the operating system while preserving data and applications whenever possible
Point-in-time recovery
When you need to return to a specific moment before corruption or data loss occurred:
- Snapshot-based recovery: Restores systems to a specific point in time using previously captured system snapshots.
- Transaction log recovery: Uses database transaction logs to replay changes up to a specific moment, particularly useful for database systems.
- Version control recovery: Retrieves previous versions of files from version-controlled backups, allowing selective restoration of specific document versions.
Types of data backups
You don’t need to engage in expensive forms of logical and physical data recovery if you’ve already backed it up! Let’s walk through all the backup methods you can see remotely or on-server and which backup type is right for you.
On-server backups
On-server backups can be with or without the use of a control panel. This holds true for most server types, including managed VPS, cloud dedicated, and dedicated servers. Liquid Web’s fully managed servers use cPanel or Plesk for Linux and Plesk only for Windows environments.
Using a control panel and setting up on-server backups provides flexibility in the days and times they run, giving you many restore points. You’ll want to ensure that you have enough server storage to house both your live data and backups.
Remote backups
Remote backups have a different implementation for server cloud hosting than for traditional dedicated servers. Liquid Web’s cloud server backups are a part of our cloud platform. Each backup is for the full server and runs daily. These backups are stored on nodes within our data centers managed by us. Remote backup pricing varies between providers.
Full backups
A full or complete backup involves making comprehensive backup copies of every file and folder in a system to a backup storage location. The primary advantage of this method is its simplicity and completeness. Restoring from a full backup is straightforward since every piece of data is stored in one place.
However, the disadvantages include high storage requirements and longer backup times, as every file is backed up regardless of whether it has changed. Full backups are preferred when you need a reliable, comprehensive file of all your data, as long as you have sufficient storage capacity to handle large data volumes.
Incremental backups
Incremental backups only pay attention to what data has changed since the last time you backed it up, whether the last backup was full or incremental. This method is ideal for environments where data changes frequently but the total volume of data is manageable.
The advantages are clear — reduced backup time and less storage space for your backup copies required compared to full backups. The disadvantage is that recovery can be more complex and time-consuming, requiring the last full backup plus all subsequent incremental backups.
Differential backups
Differential backups go back to the last full backup and copy all of the changes made since then. They’re preferred when you need a balance between reduced backup time and simplified recovery, making them suitable for environments with moderate change rates and storage availability.
The advantage of differential backups is that backup time is quicker than a full backup. However, differential backups require more storage space than incremental backups because they can duplicate data across multiple backups.
How to make a risk assessment
The first thing you want to do is assess the risks related to securing the data for your business and clients to ensure business continuity.
Depending on the services you provide, you may need to conduct annual risk assessments. There can also be compliance requirements, such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI) or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). If you need to meet those standards, use PCI-Compliant Hosting or HIPAA-Compliant Cloud Hosting, respectively.
To run a risk assessment, you need to look at your data classification, data ownership, and data storage and security. Let’s break each of those down.
How is data classified?
You’ll need to know and understand how your site or application gathers data. It’s also vital to know the classification of it as well. This will determine the storage and security of data as you assess risk.
Some common data classifications are public, private, and restricted data. Information that’s available to and from the public may not need retention. If it does, the risk of compromising that information would be low since it is public. In contrast, if private or restricted information were compromised, it would be catastrophic.
Luckily, modern data classification solutions leverage automation to scan, identify, and categorize information based on content patterns, metadata, and usage context. These tools can process vast amounts of data consistently, reducing human error while ensuring sensitive information receives appropriate protection levels according to your policies.
Who owns the data?
Once you’ve determined the data classification, you’ll want to establish data ownership.
Does this data belong to your business, your client, or an outside individual or entity?
This is critical to determine what processes are necessary for accessing, storing, and securing the data. It’s also good to have security access measures in place such as two-factor authentication. After accomplishing this vital step, you can move on to access measures, storage, and security.
How is data stored and secured?
Data storage and security are factors in the assessment process to watch on a continual basis. This will include storage capacity and where specific data will be in the setup.
For instance, do you want the operating system and site content on the same drive array?
This can also dictate the type of drives (HDD or SSD) as well as the array implementation of them. Disk encryption is another thing to consider in the security piece of the assessment. Determine the access method for those who need it.
Create a data backup and recovery plan
Any risk assessment plan needs a data backup or recovery plan. Businesses of all sizes see the impact of data loss due to catastrophic events. Having a plan to get back up and running should something happen is critical.
First, you need to understand the impacts of a crisis. That’s where a business impact analysis (BIA) can prove invaluable. The BIA will outline the consequences of disrupting business functions and processes resulting from data loss. It’ll also place a proper backup and disaster recovery service into place.
Mission-critical systems and infrastructure — know what you need
This is where an infrastructure assessment comes in handy. Because you know the classification of data, ownership, storage, and security, implementing a backup solution shouldn’t be difficult.
The other part of the equation would be the actual infrastructure itself. You’ll need to consider the configuration of your servers and how this setup will factor into your backup strategy.
Some organizations choose to use a single server for their backup process. You can back up the data on the server or to a remote location. For others, a multi-server setup may be the best way to put backups in place. You’ll need to decide between backing each server up to its own server, drive, separate server, or server cluster.
On-server backup storage, or local storage, simply means the backup and live data exist on the same server. This can either be on the same drive or another drive on the server.
A configuration with on-server backups would have direct access to data, usually contained in the file system or on a separate virtual machine. This can make it easier to restore a file or entire sets of data. However, this wouldn’t provide the ability to recover data during a full server failure.
By contrast, remote server backups are a safer disaster recovery option. That’s because the distance creates security against physical breaches. Depending on how far away the remote servers are located, direct access to the backups may or may not be an option.
Why planning for data backup and recovery is important
In creating the recovery plan, it’s essential to consider the recovery time objective (RTO) and the recovery point objective (RPO). The RTO measures how long your business can be offline before the damages are catastrophic. What that time frame looks like may vary from business to business.
Businesses that count on obtaining data and storing it in databases would suffer if that flow of data stopped for even one hour. Busy WooCommerce stores can lose money if potential customers aren’t able to access their stores to buy products. A capable backup and recovery plan should account for the time it would take to get systems restored.
The RPO measures how much data you can lose during a catastrophic event before your ability to do or remain in business is in question. There’s nothing worse than restoring your systems and finding there were not enough restore points to ensure the most recent changes were intact.
Have a team — be ready to go
Whether your infrastructure is in-house or with a managed provider, it’s essential to have a team willing to act at a moment’s notice. If you’re in-house, ensuring your backup and recovery plan accounts for your team’s availability in crisis will prove invaluable.
If you’re hosting your systems via a managed provider, it’s good to know what their data backup and recovery plans are. This is usually outlined in a service and organization controls (SOC) report. This can be the difference between data loss, downtime for longer than desired, or quick recovery and loss avoidance.
Liquid Web’s SOC 3 report and all other certifications are available on our site.
Check with your host for backup services to match your business’s needs
If you’re trying to back up or recover your data on your own, that can be tough. It takes time and specialized skills. But you know how important it is and how costly a mistake can be. That’s why having a managed hosting provider can make data backup and recovery easy.
Liquid Web has sales, support, dedicated system monitoring, and a recovery team available 24/7/365 to fill all your data backup and disaster recovery needs.
Get started with Liquid Web today.
Note on the original publish date: This blog was originally published in December 2018. It has since been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.