What’s the Difference Between Backups vs Disaster Recovery?

Backups involve saving data by copying it to a secure location, enabling recovery in case of infrastructure issues, accidental deletion, or hardware failure. Backups can be stored in various ways, such as on a secondary server in the same data center, a remote data center, or in the cloud using tools like AWS Backup or Veeam.

Disaster recovery encompasses a broader set of policies, tools, and procedures designed to restore or maintain critical technology infrastructure and systems after a natural or human-induced disaster. DR focuses on ensuring business continuity by keeping IT systems that support essential functions operational during significant disruptions. Solutions like Zerto or Azure Site Recovery are commonly used for DR.

While both solutions can help protect your data and critical information against unplanned disruptions and outages, sometimes backups alone aren’t enough.

Here is a breakdown of what you can expect from backups and disaster recovery solutions, so you can ensure your business keeps running even if your primary servers go down.

What Are Basic Backup Solutions?

Remember back in college or high school when you had to write a big term paper or thesis and you would save your work to a jump drive or CD (yes, those used to be a thing) in case your computer crashed and you lost everything?

You were running a basic backup of your most critical files.

How Backups Work

Backups work by providing quick and easy access to your data in case of smaller disruptions like outages, lost equipment, accidental deletion or hard drive crashes. Backup solutions copy your existing information to a second storage environment. You could choose to simply back up a few important files or your entire database.

Types of Backups

• On-site Backups: Stored locally for fast access but vulnerable to site-wide disasters.

• Cloud Backups: Platforms like Backblaze or Acronis offer near real-time replication to off-site data centers, improving resilience and cost-effectiveness.

• Immutable Backups: Protect against ransomware by storing unchangeable data copies, often using solutions like Rubrik.

The Cons of Backup Solutions

There are a few drawbacks to relying on backup solutions as your failsafe. Consider the college term paper example: If you have a sudden inspiration and write three more pages just to have your computer crash before saving your work to your backup source, you’ll have to start from the last moment you backed up. It’s the same with your business files—your data will only be updated to your previous backup.

Since many companies use backup for smaller-scale outages, in many instances they will keep their backups on-site or close to their primary facility. If these companies are hit by widespread natural disasters like hurricanes or earthquakes, there’s a chance those backups could go offline as well.

Backups have limitations:

• Data Loss Risk: Data is only current up to the last backup. If a crash occurs before a scheduled backup, recent changes may be lost.
• Localized Risks: On-site backups can be destroyed in natural disasters like floods or earthquakes.
• Cybersecurity Gaps: Without proper encryption or air-gapped storage, backups can be compromised in cyberattacks.

What Are Cloud Backup Solutions?

As a response, cloud-based backup options are becoming more popular because data center providers are able to offer near real-time data replication at off-site locations. In some cases, these cloud backup solutions are more cost-effective and reliable for business needs.

What Are Disaster Recovery Solutions?

For more large-scale outages, disaster recovery is your best option.

Disaster recovery solutions cover more than just the major natural disasters that might immediately come to mind. In fact, only about 10 percent of unplanned outages are caused by weather. That’s behind system failure, cyber incidents and human error.

Disaster recovery solutions replicate your environment, so if there is a major disruption, an automatic failover transfers the management and operation of your infrastructure to a secondary machine and site to keep your applications and business online. Your servers will then run off your disaster recovery site until your primary facility is back online and capable of resuming system functionality.

It’s important to note that disaster recovery options come in all shapes and sizes. Synchronous solutions replicate your data in near real-time. That makes this option one of the most comprehensive, but also generally more expensive. On the other hand, asynchronous solutions have more delayed duplication, which means some of your most recent data may not be recovered.

Types of DR Solutions

• Synchronous DR: Replicates data in near real-time for minimal data loss but is more expensive.
• Asynchronous DR: Offers delayed replication, which is more affordable but risks losing recent data.
• DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service): Cloud-based DR solutions like Microsoft Azure Site Recovery or Carbonite provide scalable, cost-effective options.

Cons of Disaster Recovery

• Cost: Synchronous DR and comprehensive DRaaS can be expensive, especially for small businesses.
• Complexity: DR requires regular testing and maintenance to ensure failover and failback work as intended.
• Scalability: Solutions must scale with business growth, which may increase costs.

Key Backup and Disaster Recovery Terms

Understanding a few essential terms can help develop your strategic decisions and enable you to better evaluate backup and disaster recovery solutions.

• Recovery time objective (RTO) is the amount of time it takes to recover normal business operations after an outage. As you look to set your RTO, you’ll need to consider how much time you’re willing to lose—and the impact that time will have on your bottom line. The RTO might vary greatly from one type of business to another. For example, if a public library loses its catalog system, it can likely continue to function manually for a few days while the systems are restored. But if a major online retailer loses its inventory system, even 10 minutes of downtime—and the associated loss in revenue—would be unacceptable.
• Recovery point objective (RPO) refers to the amount of data you can afford to lose in a disaster. You might need to copy data to a remote data center continuously so that an outage will not result in any data loss. Or you might decide that losing five minutes or one hour of data would be acceptable.
• Failover is the disaster recovery process of automatically offloading tasks to backup systems in a way that is seamless to users. You might fail over from your primary data center to a secondary site, with redundant systems that are ready to take over immediately.
• Failback is the disaster recovery process of switching back to the original systems. Once the disaster has passed and your primary data center is back up and running, you should be able to fail back seamlessly as well.
• Restore is the process of transferring backup data to your primary system or data center. The restore process is generally considered part of backup rather than disaster recovery.

Backups vs Disaster Recovery: How to Choose the Best Solution for Your Business

In some cases, just the backup is enough to protect certain parts of your business from interruptions. For example, a complete disaster recovery plan for computers or mobile devices intended for employees generally does not require a full disaster recovery solution. If an employee’s device is lost or broken, your company is unlikely to be critically affected. You can replace the device and restore your data from a backup.

On the other hand, disaster recovery is crucial to protecting services and infrastructure that your company depends on to operate on a day-to-day basis. For example, suppose your employees’ PCs run as “thin clients” dependent on a central server to work. In that case, an interruption on that server can critically affect the business’ entire operation as it will prevent all employees from being able to use their workstations. Such an event is much more severe than an individual workstation break.

In most cases, the best solutions involve both backups and disaster recovery.

Hybrid Strategies

Most businesses benefit from combining backups and DR:

• Use backups for non-critical data or employee devices, leveraging cost-effective cloud solutions.
• Implement DR for mission-critical systems, ensuring low RTO and RPO for key applications.
• Tier your approach: Apply synchronous DR to high-priority systems and asynchronous DR or backups to less critical ones.

For example, a retailer might use Veeam for daily backups of customer data and Zerto for real-time DR of its e-commerce platform, ensuring compliance with PCI DSS through encrypted data transfers and audit trails.

A solid backup plan that keeps your data accessible is helpful for minor disruptions, but without a larger, more comprehensive strategy, can cause all sorts of problems for your company. For instance, if your business collects, stores or transmits information that requires strict PCI DSS or HIPAA compliance, you will want to make sure those files are properly backed up and accessible in the event of a disaster—which might not be possible with basic backup solutions.

Consider incorporating your basic backup under the umbrella of a larger disaster recovery strategy to ensure you’re fully protected. Third-party providers will offer cloud-based disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) solutions that are often more cost-effective and appropriate for your business needs.

Do your homework and determine the best strategy for your company. Because it’s not a question of if, but when you’ll need to recover from an unplanned outage.