Security does not always mean taking defensive actions against cyber threats or use technical tools and techniques that will detect malicious packets or keep track of who is illegally penetrating the system. Sometimes, a security professional has to take precautionary measures to safeguard your data from unwanted threats that are not any attack, penetrating, or defensive mechanism but simply backing you your useful daily data in some other location. In this chapter, you will learn about the different backup approaches.
Backup As Nested Security Measure
Every day you heard about any security breach in companies and firms where cybercriminals target data repositories and harm the organization by either stealing them or corrupting them. So storing the data in a centric location will lead to this issue to a severe extent. So, back up your data in clouds or other internal servers in what security professionals recommend. Thus, any ransomware attacks won't affect much by encrypting all the system's data and ask for ransom. In that case, you can format the system and start all over again and bring your files by retrieving it from the backup system. This backup system and their backing up policies vary from one company to the next.
For example, if your organization uses tape-based backup rather than cloud-based, then the security measures associated with it also change. If your organization uses the tape-based backup approach by storing the data in any removable media or magnetic drives, then there should have to be some physical security that needs to be taken care of for these back-ups. If it's a cloud-based backup approach, then the technical teams and security have to ensure that the cloud storages are secure and protected with encryption mechanisms.
Major Types of Backup
There is the most common, major, and popular types of backup are mentioned below:
Full Backup
As the name suggests, does a full data backup of every single file and a folder as the system is backed up. The time required and space is more than other backup types, but the data restoration process for lost data from these back-ups is done faster.
- Advantage: The entire collection of data and its backup copy is available in one location, and hence, it is easy to manage.
- Disadvantage: Time and space taken by this technique are more.
Incremental Backup
In this form of backup, the backup done for the first time is a complete one. Subsequent backup iterations are used to store only changes that were done since the preceding backup. This backup process is much faster than the other backup techniques.
- Advantage: Because updates or changes made during the backup run are processed, it can often be used. Also, the time taken by this backup technique is short.
- Disadvantage: Data recovery speed is slow.
Differential Backup
This is similar to that of incremental backup. For this, the preliminary backup is a full one, and successive backup deals with changes made with the files from the last backup. The storage requirement is more here, but the data recovering process is faster.
- Advantage: Only updated data is backed up, and data recovery in this technique is faster than other backup types.
- Disadvantage: Time and space for completing the backup need more time.
Mirror Backup
As the name suggests, this type of backup produces an exact copy of the original data. What it does is when outdated files get deleted; they evaporate from the mirror backup storage as well while the system backs up the files.
- Advantage: Faster and automatic deletion of old data.
- Disadvantage: Time taken is more.
