What is the Difference between Backup and Replication?

When it comes to protecting your data and network infrastructure, you will have to decide on what solution is right for your business in terms of data backup and replication. To help you with that, this article will explain the difference between data backup and replication.

First, let’s start with the basic definition of data backup and replication:

  • Data backup is the process of making copies of your data and saving them to different types of data storage devices. It focuses on the ability to recover data lost, damaged or deleted file critical to a computer or server.
  • Replication is the process of copying data between different sites of a company. This process allows you to have an identical image of your data or systems you replicate from site A to site B.

To have a better understanding the difference between backup and replication, let’s discuss the differences between data Disaster Recovery (DR) plan, High Availability (HA) plan and Business Continuity (BC) plan.

  • Disaster Recovery is a strategy where you resume the operation of your business after a disruptive event such as fire, accidental, natural or man-made disasters. Having a disaster recovery plan or a backup solution is a solid step to a disaster recovery plan.
  • High Availability is a strategy that allows your applications and systems to be available with minimum down time caused by hardware or software failure.
  • Business Continuity is a strategy to make sure that your mission-critical applications are continuing to run fully by providing the ability to failover to an alternate piece of hardware (or an entire site) when there is a disruptive event in your infrastructure. This will allow your business continue to operate without disruption of services.

Data replication is a component to all of these strategies.

Having both a data backup and replication strategy is ideal and will protect your business from disruptive events that might leave you with hours or even days of downtime. To learn more tricks for protection your important data and information, reach out to Syndeo Communications. We proudly provide small and medium businesses with reliable San Diego IT support and offer free consultations if you would like to learn more about our services and product offerings. Call 760-650-3300 today and speak with one of our expert consultants.