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Backup Options Transcription

Welcome to our data backups module. It is very important to make sure that your data is being backed up properly and frequently. In case of an incident where you might lose data, you'll be able to recover from your backups. Backups should be done at the enterprise level by an administrator with a standardized procedure for how it will take place.

You do not want to rely on your individual users to back up their data, because they may forget to back up the data, leading to a loss of your company's important resources. Robotic tape changers are still very popular. These devices are able to automatically change the back up tapes so that you are constantly using a fresh tape.

You're backup should be kept off site and you should make sure they are updated regularly. You can use a company like Iron Mountain which will store your tapes for you in an off site location. This way, if an incident occurs which damages your facility. You will be able to recover from the backup tapes or backup media that you are storing remotely.

You can perform a hot backup, which is a backup that is performed while a system is up and running. This is popular with databases and it also is known as a quiescent or snapshot backup. You will typically have a normal backup schedule, such as backing up the system once a day or once a week.

Before your administrators make any system changes or modifications, they will often perform an on demand backup. Meaning, that they will perform a backup outside of your normal schedule in case something goes wrong while they're performing the update or maintenance. They will have the most up to date copy of the data to restore from.

One of the fastest and most affordable options for backing up data is using a disk to disk backup. This method is fast and affordable, and you can randomly access data stored on the backup media. We have a mirrored backup where we duplicate data and store it to two locations.

Every time a file is modified or created, it is stored on your primary media but is also automatically stored on the backup media. And this is common with SANs, storage area networks, or NAS, network-attached storage. We can also use remote journaling to back up our databases. This is a less expensive strategy and here, we are only capturing information about the transactions that occur on the database.

We are not maintaining a full copy of the database each day. In case something goes wrong with the backup, you would take the last backup that was available. And then use the journal information to rerun all of the transactions that had not occurred by the time the last backup had occurred. Synchronous is done in real time and asynchronous is not done in real time, but it has less overhead and it's performed in batches. We can also use electronic vaulting, or e-vaulting. With this technology, we are backing up the data locally to some type of medium, such as a tape, and then we are copying to a remote sight electronically over the internet.

This technology uses a lot of internet resources and bandwidth on your wide area network. And it is very important to use encryption and a virtual private network to make sure that you're data is secure while it is traveling on the internet. We have a few different types of backups that we can perform.

A normal backup also known as a full backup has the shortest recovery time. And this requires only one set to restore the data. With this backup, we reset the archive bit to indicate that each file has been backed up. With an incremental backup, you will need all of the sets of the backup series to restore the data.

With this method, you are only backing up the data that has been modified since the last backup. This allows you to create your backups faster. But it is slower to restore the system in case of an incident. And with this method, we are still resetting the archive bit to indicate that each file has been backed up.

We also have a differential backup, which requires two sets to restore the data. An easy way to remember that differential requires two sets is that differential starts with D, the Spanish words for two, is dos. And so if you remember differential, dos, you'll remember that you need two sets of the backup media to restore.

With a differential backup, you're backing up all of the files that have been modified since your last full backup. Your backup will be slower each day but it will be faster to restore, your RTO will be quicker. RTO stands for recovery time objective and it just means the amount of time it will take your system to get back online after an incident.

With a differential backup,we are not changing the archive bit. So if you remember that differential starts with D. D is for don't reset the bit. For the CISSP exam, you want to remember that the normal or full backup will the have the shortest recovery time objective. That the incremental backup, we will need all of the sets to restore the data and with the differential backup, we will need two sets to restore the data.

You can also make a copy backup. A copy backup is same as a full backup, but we're not changing the archive bit. This type of backup is done in addition to whatever your normal backup procedures are. Typically, before a system upgrade or system maintenance. Often, before we make changes to a server, we will simply make a copy of the files on that server or a snapshot, and move it to another server in case something goes wrong during our maintenance activities.

We can also create an extra copy of our data for off site storage. Snap shots are a full copy of your operational system, and you're able to use these to restore the system in case something goes wrong. One of the problems with making copy backups however, is because the process is so easy, you will have many copies of your data lying around.

This can cause a problem if an unauthorized person locates these devices. It is important to make sure that the data is encrypted on the back up devices in case an unauthorized user is able to obtain access to them. You should also have a policy in your company to locate this backup tapes and make sure that they are regularly deleted when you no longer need them.

This concludes our data backups module. Thank you for watching.