Modern Data Protection

Chapter 9. Backup and Recovery Software Methods

A commercial backup and recovery solution can take a variety of forms, including everything from traditional backup methods that aren’t that fundamentally different from what I used 30 years ago to techniques that have only come out in the past few years. The goal of this chapter is to give you a bird’s-eye view of all the options available to you and the various pros and cons of each approach.

Is Everything Backup?

There will be backup solutions discussed in this chapter that many people do not think of when they think of the word backup; however, I define backup rather broadly as anything that is a copy of data stored separately from the original that can be used to restore the original system if it is damaged. A number of technological solutions meet that definition.

When most people think about the word backup, they think of tape drives and batch backup processes of files or databases; backing up into formats like tar, dump, or a commercial format. They might expand this antiquated definition of backup to include disk as a target. But they might not think of something like replication, snapshots, or continuous data protection as having anything to do with backup. I respectfully disagree.

You will see that not everything mentioned in this chapter meets my definition of backup when used by itself. A perfect example of that would be both replication and snapshots. By themselves, I do not think of them as valid backup methods. (A ...