Definitions to ensure your backup solutions are cost-effective , performant and truly aligned with your business requirements .
Backup and disaster recovery ( DR ) services and planning are not particularly exciting , but they will certainly lead to excitement if appropriate data security and robustness plans have not been prepared . When the topic of DR arises , many people ( even those who should know better !) still think of tapes that have to be rotated and couriered to an offsite storage facility . It is true that there still are environments where this approach to backup and recovery is used , but clearly there now are far more efficient , reliable and cost-effective backup and DR options , especially when it comes to cloud-based storage .
Around this topic , a number of terms are often used interchangeably , when in fact they have separate and distinct meanings . So it is a good idea to review them .
Backup / Restore
This term is primarily focused on the data itself , not applications . Solutions tend to rely on robust object storage ( i . e ., Amazon S3 or Azure Blob Storage ). They are often based on a layered approach of “ warm ” data ( a smaller amount of data that can be restored quickly ) plus “ cold ” data ( larger amounts of archived storage that is cheaper to restore , but takes longer and is more expensive to access ).
Disaster Recovery
This term is application focused , requiring the consideration of both the data layer and application stack . Designs should prepare for a range of failure possibilities . Solutions vary widely depending on how quickly the application must return to service after a failure ( Recovery Time Objective , or RTO ), and how much time ’ s worth of application data loss can be tolerated ( Recovery Point Objective , or RPO ). Note that there is no “ best ” option , only options that are
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