Backup & Recovery

Chapter 24. It’s All About Data Protection

The chapters that have preceded talk about nothing but backup and recovery, but it’s important to give you a little context before I close out the book. While backup and recovery are extremely important, they are but one part of the data protection landscape. Data protection is defined as all activities involved in protecting data from the various things that could happen to it. Data protection activities include backup, recovery, archive, storage security, and disaster recovery, and every company should be aware of all of these activities regardless of its size. While smaller companies may be less subject to some aspects of data protection, such as long-term archiving or compliance issues, they should regularly evaluate each aspect of data protection to determine how much it applies to them—and what they’re doing about it. This is why this book, which focuses on backup and recovery, ends with a chapter on data protection—to make sure that you know that backup and recovery is just the beginning of your job.

Perhaps your company’s archive and storage security requirements are easy to meet, allowing you to fulfill the rest of your company’s data protection requirements with an open-source backup system and a simple off-site tape rotation scheme. Perhaps you’ve got sophisticated archive or storage security needs, and you’re considering implementing an open-source backup and recovery system to leave room in the budget for some of the commercial ...