What's the Differences Between Disaster Recovery and Backup?

1.  Different Meanings

Disaster recovery: Disaster recovery is a set of policies, tools, and procedures that enable the recovery or continuation of critical technology infrastructure and systems in the aftermath of a natural or man-made disaster.

Backup: A backup is a copy of computer data that is made and stored elsewhere so that it can be used to restore the original in the event of data loss. The backup plan is the preplanned procedure of copying your data, files, systems, or environment manually or automatically on schedule.

Differences: disaster recovery focuses on the recovery ability of the system after a disaster to avoid downtime. And backup is part of the disaster recovery involving the process of saving and protecting the production data and safely storing it away for later use.

Disaster recovery provides greater data security for enterprises than in the past, but still, there is confusion about the two from time to time. This article explains what disaster recovery and backup are in simple terms.

2.  Different Purposes

A disaster recovery system is to ensure the "linearity" of system data and services, namely after the system fails, it can retrieve and restore the data to bring the operation back to normal ASAP.

A backup is a computer data copy taken and stored elsewhere to be used to restore the original after a data loss incident. Its purpose is to deal with the logical errors in the system data and the preservation of historical data. Backup paves the way to disaster recovery.

Therefore, even though we have various disaster restoration technologies today, the backup system is still irreplaceable.

3.  Backup Is the Cornerstone

Backup is the process of copying the entire system or a subset of the data from the application host's hard disk or array to another storage medium in order to prevent data loss caused by system operation errors or system failure.

Backup is the last defense for the high availability of data and aims to recover data in case of a system data crash.

4.  Disaster Recovery Is Indispensable

So, if the backup system is built, do we still need the disaster recovery backup system? It depends on the business department's expectation of RTO (the maximal amount of business downtime you can accept after a disaster) / RPO (the maximal amount of data you can accept to be lost after a disaster, which is measured in time). For example, if you can accept an 8-hour RTO and 1-day RPO, a basic backup plan can definitely meet your data protection requirement. But in most cases, the smaller the numbers are, the better it is for the companies, and having backups solely is not enough, because it only works to prevent data from loss, but fails to take over the real-time business.

Hence, a disaster recovery system that can guarantee business continuity is also essential for companies. The disaster recovery backup people often mentioned is the disaster recovery system taking over these businesses to work properly when the production system cannot work. Meanwhile, the remote disaster recovery system has the ability to handle various disasters, especially regional and devastating disasters, and has relatively adequate data protection and disaster recovery functions to ensure the data integrity and business continuity after disasters happen and resumes the business system in the least time to minimize the loss.

5.  Disaster Recovery and Backup Work Together

Without question, a full disaster recovery strategy is important and almost mandatory for companies of all sizes working in areas such as IT, banks, or health care, but as we said above, backup is the cornerstone for disaster recovery. In fact, the comparison of their importance is a pseudo proposition. We cannot tell which outweighs the other, although there is a vast difference between the two, they complement each other.

6.  Factors Considered in Enterprise Safety System Planning

For enterprises, how to build their own disaster recovery system? Issues as to whether to build the backup system or the disaster recovery system only? or build them both at the same time or step by step? sequences and others are mainly determined to the needs of the business:

1) Types of disasters to prevent:

The types of disasters that the enterprise information system may encounter and their proportions are as follows:

"Human error", "software damage and program error" and "virus" are called logic errors, accounting for 56% of the total faults. These errors can only be prevented through the backup system;

"Hardware and system failures" and "natural disasters" can be prevented through a Disaster recovery system (or remote backup), accounting for 44% of the total failure rate.

2) RTO and RPO indicators

Technically, there are two main indicators to measure the disaster recovery system: RPO (recovery point object) and RTO (recovery time object), in which RPO represents the amount of data allowed to be lost when a disaster occurs; RTO represents the time of the system recovery.

Generally speaking, the disaster recovery system can provide better RTO and RPO indicators because it copies your crucial data to the remote DR center for failover once the production computer crashes in a matter of minutes.

7.  Common Disaster Recovery Combinations

For the above reasons, the industry generally adopts the following methods in the construction of disaster recovery systems:

l  Build a local backup system in the computer room

l  Build remote backup system

In this way, the price of the backup system contains backup and remote disaster recovery to avoid data loss caused by earthquakes, fires, or other disasters in the main production center.

l  Backup system + remote disaster recovery system

This is an ideal integrated solution for a disaster recovery system, which can avoid largely all kinds of possible errors.

8.  Disaster Recovery and Backup Solution Service

Considering the significance of backup and disaster recovery for companies and organizations, it is necessary to set up an adequate and detailed data protection system. Vinchin is one of the reliable protection solution vendors proving data backup, offsite disaster recovery, instant recovery, and more to fully guarantee data security and business continuity for virtualization users.

1)    Smart Backup Strategies

Vinchin Backup & Recovery offers a variety of backup combinations for users to choose from-full backup, (forever) incremental backup driven by CBT and Speedkit and differential backup by daily, weekly, and monthly-you can select the strategies according to your business. When you set the timing for the backup strategies, different time scales are available to avoid scheduling conflicts of work and backup.

2)    Remote Site Copy

Complied with the 3-2-1 backup rule in the industry, Vinhcin Backup & Recovery builds a remote offsite centers to store and secure data. You can replicate your backup data to the offsite DR center using Vinchin Backup Copy. So, if something happens to your primary production site, the offsite backup copy is accessible to recover the VM to the production system. You are also allowed to retrieve the data from the full backup stored in the offsite DR center.

3)    15s Instant Restore

Vinchin Backup & Recovery allows you to recover an entire VM and all of its data from any restore point without affecting the original backup data. Backups that have been deduplicated or compressed can be recovered. Combined with offsite backup copies and instant recovery, you can ensure business continuity and minimize the loss of critical business interruption due to a disaster by instantly recovering a VM to the remote production system.

Given the import of data backup and disaster recovery, one cannot emphasize how fundamental and important their constructions are. All the human error, software damage, hardware and system failures, and natural disasters are so hard to defend that companies know they do happen. Thus, these situations leave us no choice but to set up a complete and efficient backup and disaster recovery system to protect the key data concerning the survival of companies.

Apply for the Vinchin Backup & Recovery 60 days full-featured free trial now, disaster recovery is only possible when you back up the data in advance.