Data Protection And Backup: Questions To Consider When Creating Your Disaster Recovery Plan

When it comes to data protection and recovery, many businesses are not as safe as they believe. The first thing that comes to mind when considering a disaster recovery plan, by the average consumer and corporate technology professionals alike, is a backup of critical files.

The frequency of backup is an important consideration. Any information added or changed between the last backup and the data loss event will be truly lost. Some companies backup nightly; others backup only once per week. Still others run pro-grams in the background that backup data any time a file is changed.

Tapes were once the standard medium for backing up computer data, because they were less expensive than disks. But tapes cannot instantly jump to a specific file; they must instead spool forward or backward to reach the information to be restored. Tapes are also inherently less robust than disks, just due to the mere na-ture of the media,

For these reasons, disk-based back up media is now the media of choice for IT professionals. Disks are more stable than tapes. They are stronger and less prone to physical damage. The storage on disks is not subject to damage from stray elec-tromagnetic radiation. While tapes were once the economical choice, the price of disks has dropped markedly in the past decade.