The first traditional backup option that has generally been used for years is to move the data that resides on your hard drive to either another hard drive that is external to your computer system or to some kind of memory device that is capable of storing your data. In years past, this might have been a floppy disk. Today, there is a very strong likelihood that it will be a memory stick. Incredibly, there are memory sticks on the market today that can store around 32 gigabytes of data. This is a staggering sum of data, to say the least.

While this sounds great in theory, what happens if your house happens to burn down? Odds are, your memory stick is probably somewhere in the rubble. This creates a situation in which it really doesn’t make much sense to keep your backup data in the same physical vicinity of your main computer system. Why? Just look at the example that we mentioned a moment ago. What if your entire house burns down? Worse yet, what if you happen to be traveling and you lose your memory stick? As you can imagine, this can be very problematic.

The second traditional backup option, believe it or not, was to simply transfer data that was located on your hard drive directly to some other computer system located in your home or office. Once again, you can probably see where the deficiency in this plan resides. It simply doesn’t make sense to exclusively backup all of your data to either an external hard drive or memory stick that will be in the physical vicinity of your main computer system. While the odds of your home burning down are low, there is still a variety of other risks that you will want to avoid by having your backups located in the same physical spot as your main computer system. So what’s the solution?

With the widespread adoption of broadband Internet service, a new type of backup system became a viable option. We are talking about an online backup system that pulls files from your computer and stores them safely in a geographically separate location. Best of all, you can access this location from anywhere in the world that has an Internet connection. That means you are free to sleep well at night knowing that all of your important data is backed up to a location that is not literally the same as that of your primary computer system.

Backup types

Depending on your data type Vault Online recommends to choose between four types of backup:
• Full online backup
• Full offline backup
• Incremental online backup
• Incremental offline backup

Time constraints and the amount of data that you have will determine what backup type to use for which data and how often to perform it.

Live backup vs offline backup
Live backups are performed while the system is in full operation. Users can access the backed up application or the underlying database to perform normal actions such as data access and update.

Offline backups are performed when the system is not in operation and is inactive (e.g. at night or on weekends). Users cannot connect to the application or the database, and backup is the only process affecting the system.

Incremental backup vs complete backup
Incremental backup and full backup can be used in conjunction with either live backup or offline backup.

As the name suggests, a complete backup is backing up of the full data set. You can perform a backup of all files, databases and applications.

An incremental backup is backup of the changed data set only. It can be setup to backup the data changed since either last incremental or last complete backup.

How often to run backup procedure
You will need to determine a suitable period of time (called backup window) when a specific type of backup can be executed. It is recommended to schedule a backup window when the system has the least activity or no activity.

Selected backup type, size of your data set, preferred recovery time and other conditions will determine the duration of a backup process. Therefore you need to develop procedures that will suit your situation and requirements.

Some backups can be performed live while other backups should only be done offline. For example, static files, such as photos, videos, system configuration files and the like can be backed up at any time. The backup window for static files is limitless.

Conversely, because databases are always active, they require special commands being activated to allow backup in order to keep data integrity. In this case, the backup window during the off-peak hours is recommended.