Meet Today’s Data Backup and Restore Challenges

How you back up your data and applications matters. It’s about finding the disaster recovery strategy that helps you meet your RTOs and RPOs. So what are they? Here’s a quick breakdown:

• RTO: The maximum time your business can afford to lose access to the data that powers your apps and operations. It determines how quickly you need your system to recover. 

• RPO: Refers to the maximum amount of data you can afford to lose. Use this to determine the frequency of your backups.

Common backup methods include:

• Full-image backup: You back up the full image of your data to create a restore point you can instantly roll back to. Because you’re performing a full backup, this technique takes the longest to store.

• Differential backup: Backs up all changes since the last full-image backup. Restoration only requires two files: the last full-image backup, followed by the most recent differential backup. 

• Incremental backup: You incrementally back up changes since the last full-image restore point. After a set number of incremental backups, the cycle completes with a full-image backup. Restoration starts with the last full-image backup, followed by incremental backups to the target RPO. 

• Real-time backup: Also called a continuous backup, this method involves instantly copying every change to your data to a separate storage device. It provides the most granular and comprehensive backup.

Backing up your files through frequent snapshots and other data-protection methods is a common way to mitigate ransomware attacks. Unfortunately, hackers have realized that if they want to collect a ransom, they’ll need to attack the backups as well. One way to protect your backups from attackers is to use immutable snapshots that cannot be deleted or changed—even if admin credentials are compromised. Learn how Pure FlashBlade with SafeMode snapshots addresses this critical vulnerability.