Revision:Backup Policies

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Backup Policies (a subsection of 14.1)

It is important for a company to develop a backup policy thus ensuring a recovery procedure is successful;

Thus in the formulation of a backup policy there are certain factors that need to be addressed. These include;

When the backup should occur?

Most companies institute a night back up because the backup takes up a lot of processing power thus rendering it difficult to carry out other work.

Who should carry out back up?

In a company the responsibility of backing up and ensuring that this has occurred successful is allocated to a particular person, in some companies this is filled by the Ict manager.

What should be backed up?

To address this factor, it is important to take into consideration the value of the data being produced and the frequency of change. Essentially the back up should consist of important data.

Where should it be kept?

There are some outside firms which carry out the backup hence they may keep the backups. However an equally appropriate place in which to keep a backup would be in a fireproof safe, however it would additionally be helpful to keep them somewhere apart from the office.

What media should be used?

If the data is extremely important a suitable method of storing a backup would be a Redundant Array of inexpensive disks (R.A.I.D), this method means that transactions are simultaneously copied to three separate disks enabling the disks to placed in different places. This is common place in organisations where the data is important thus the consequences of losing such files can prove devastating.

What type of back up should be used?

The backups include full back up and Incremental, Full backup entails that all files are backed up on a daily basis, however this is time consuming and not necessary in places where the data is not changing on a constant basis, in which situation an incremental backup would be deemed necessary.

Incremental backup is where a full backup is perhaps carried out on a weekly basis, but daily only the files which have changed are backed up. Eg if full back up carried out on the Sunday on a disc and labelled "Sunday" the next day only the changes would be backed up on a disk labelled "Monday" and similarly the files which changed on Tuesday would be place on a disk labelled "Tuesday" and so forth. Incremental back up is less time consuming but difficult to implement a recovery with.

The prospect of data logging

Data logging needs to be carried out to show who carried out the last backup and when it was done. This enables the organisation to know when last backup was carried out thus enabling company to track backups.

The testing of back up plan

The backup plan has to be testing thus ensuring that the backed up files can be implemented if the worse occurs. Thus if the backup plan is not tried, it may come to a point where the system files are lost and it was impossible to restore files.

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These notes are for A Level ICT