Concept in Definition ABC

Our data cannot only reside in one place, that would be unsafe. Let's imagine that we have the photos of all our trips in a HDD and that, due to a mechanical failure, the surface on which the files are stored is unreadable. We would lose all the memories and the baggage that we have accumulated over the years, hopelessly.

To avoid going to such an extreme, we have to make copies of safety of our data, which in English is known as backup.

A backup It is nothing more than making a copy of our data, whatever their nature and regardless of the file format in which they are, on a medium of external storage to our computer systems, so that we can recover the information in the event that they suffer from problems of functioning

In companies, this makes it possible to guarantee the continuity of business activity, vital for subsistence of any company, while in the case of individuals it allows them to protect and not lose their memories.

I have heard cases of people who, because they have not made backup copies of their data, only have photos of their children since, say, five years of age, and none before, since some computer virus devastated their files.

To prevent that from happening to us, that we are victims of an accident that leads us to lose everything, we will have to make backup copies regularly and verify that the data it contains can be recover.

There are several ways to perform a backup, but the key is that the data always remains outside the computer system that contains the original data

This includes proceeding with means of storage external, which can range from simple hard drives USB to cloud systems, sending data through Internet.

It is important that, whenever possible, the medium on which the backups are made is external, not only to the computer system, but even to the facilities where the latter is located, since in case of some incident As, for example, a fire or a flood, even if the place is destroyed, we can save the information and, by acquiring new equipment, continue with our work.

It is for this reason, and thanks to the rise of broadband connections, their lower costs, as well as the drop in the price of disk space, which have begun to proliferate cloud storage offerings that allow, through Internet, to stock data on remote servers to work directly with them through virtual disks, or your
use as remote units of backup.

Perform a backup Remote is the most effective way to safeguard our data, but it also carries dangers to our privacy

This is so because, although our data is outside the offices of our company or our home, it is also true that being on a server connected to the Internet the 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, it is also more susceptible to being hacked and that, therefore, we may suffer some illegal access to our data, including the most sensitive.

To protect ourselves, our online backup FOREVER it must be encrypted.

In addition to how and where we store our backups, we also have several ways to carry them out

To begin with, the full copy which, as its name suggests, consists of copying, each time we do it, all the content that we have marked to endorse.

The incremental copy part of a complete copy to store, on successive days, only those new files. In this way, to recover the information, we must first restore the complete copy, and then go restoring the successive incremental copies to recover the new files.

The advantage of this mode is that the incremental copies that follow the full copy take up less volume on disk than if we made a complete copy each time, also taking less time to be made.

The differential copy It is similar to the previous incremental one, part of a complete copy, and then in successive copies what it stores are those files that have changed.

Again, in this case we play with the least volume of occupation of the files that do not constitute a complete copy.

In the last two modes, incremental and differential copy, a full copy is usually made every so often time, and in all cases several iterations of copies are saved, so that it is very easy to retrieve the data even if the backups have been affected by a virus or similar.

I don't want to say goodbye without re-emphasizing the importance of backing up, as many dangers that threaten us can cause the total or partial loss of our most necessary data and / or dear

Getting started can be as simple as using a USB stick or external hard drive in the case of a Username individual, or a visit from the computer if it is the case of a company.

Photos: Fotolia - Viperagp / LeonART

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