Another approach is to send an initial disk image to a cloud storage provider on an external drive, then upload incremental or differential backups to the service periodically. These can be enormous, so they're usually stored on local drives. A cloned disk, on the other hand, is identical to your current disk - all the same files in the same locations. Mirroring creates a full backup that takes the form of a single, usually compressed, file. It's far easier and typically faster, but it takes up a large amount of disk space. A full system backup or image can be restored and put everything on your PC back in operable condition. You'll need a system to open it on, after all, with all the software to open all of your files. This differs from a data backup because retrieving your data from the backup is the last step in recovering from a disaster. Think of "backup" as an umbrella term and a full backup as anything that captures the complete state of a drive or system at a given time. Finally, always use multi-factor authentication (MFA), particularly when object locking is not available. Look for object locking capabilities (sometimes referred to as "immutability"), which makes it essentially impossible for malware (or a system administrator, for that matter) to modify your backups. Since cloud servers are online by definition, some risks are inherent and some traditional solutions, like air-gapping (maintaining physical disconnection from all networks), aren't available. When you're dealing with a cloud backup solution, a few more software aspects of backing up come into view. The most recent data among the full, incremental, and differential backups are used for comparison, so the new incremental backup will be as small as possible, and as fast as possible to create, but it might take extra time to reassemble an up-to-date full backup when one is needed, given all the pieces in play. Incremental backups are similar, but save disk space by keeping track of historical changes and only backing up what has changed since the last incremental backup. Here are the best ways to get your data backed up properly.Ī differential backup identifies the differences between the current disk (or set of files) and the last full backup and only backs up the changed portion. This is a bit dated ("different media" once meant old-school tape backups), but the principles hold: you want copies that are impervious to drive failure, a physical disaster (such as a fire), and any kind of bug that could eliminate more than one copy of that data. A good place to start is the old 3-2-1 rule for creating three copies of your data: two locally on different media and one in the cloud. It's probably easier to get a handle on good backup practices by understanding what you should do rather than what you shouldn't. Some of these are obvious (cloud computing just puts a single copy somewhere else), some mystifying at first (RAID creates two copies - but both can fail), and some are basically incorrect (NAS by itself isn't a backup, but can be a mechanism for backups). people will tell you aren't backups include cloud computing, a single backup copy, a backup you can't restore promptly when you need to, file synchronization services like Dropbox, network-attached storage (NAS), and RAID disk arrays.
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