Backups

Question 1

Full Backup

Answer 1

A full backup is a snapshot of a workstation’s files at some point in time. It takes a while to copy all the files, but recovering from a complete copy is faster than recovering using more than one type of backup.

Question 2

Incremental backup

Answer 2

Once you have a full backup, some software can capture an incremental backup that only stores what has changed since the last incremental backup. Each incremental backup is faster and wastes less space. The downside is that you’ll need the full backup and every incremental backup to restore (and stepping through each slows the restore process down a little). Each incremental backup is faster than normal backups.

Question 3

Differential backup

Answer 3

• Instead of storing the changes since the previous backup (as an incremental backup does), a differential backup includes all changes since the last full backup. Differential backups are a great deal if your data doesn’t change rapidly—but each differential backup will be slower than the last if your data does change rapidly.

Question 4

Synthetic backup

Answer 4

A synthetic backup (also known as a synthetic full backup) is created by merging the previous full backup and all subsequent incremental backups to create a backup that is identical to a new full backup. The goal is being able to restore as quickly as you could from a full backup without taking the time and resources to take a full backup every time.

Question 5

3-2-1 rule

Answer 5

Keep at least three copies of your data on at least two types of media (e.g. hard drives, tapes, optical disks, cloud storage) and store at least one copy offsite

Question 6

Grandfather-father-son (GFS) rotation scheme

Answer 6

A basic grandfather-father-son (GFS) rotation scheme might use the SSD to back up four days a week, use one of the hard drives on the last day of each week, and use the other hard drive on the last day of each month—and store the monthly copy offsite. A scheme like this gives us at least a week to notice trouble. We can extend the scheme to buy more time by adding storage devices to each backup cycle (like using nine devices to keep three daily backups, three weekly backups, and three monthly backups) and by adding more cycles (like a yearly backup).