World Backup Day: 31st March 2019
26th March 2019
With World Backup Day just around the corner, we thought that we’d help explain some of the terminologies and take the time to announce a few new backup services you may be interested in.
Your thoughts:
As always, we value the feedback you give, and we’d be grateful if you could spare a few minutes to complete our backup survey:
http://bit.ly/PCCMBackupSurvey2019
Terminology:
What’s a backup?
A backup is a copy of data or services. If the originals are lost or damaged, it can be recovered, restoring data and services as needed.
Services
Services is a generic term used loosely to describe system functions needed to keep the business functioning. Services are typically installed onto servers.
Services for example, may provide the following functionality, :
- File share access
- Printing
- Logon authentication servers
- SharePoint
- DNS Servers (used to access internet and network resources)
- Databases (such as SQL)
How will losing one of those services impact your company?
RPO
RPO, or Recovery Point Objective, defines how much data you are prepared to lose. If the backup is taken daily and a disaster strikes, are you prepared to recreate a days’ worth of work?

RTO
RTO, or Recovery Time Objective, defines the target time to restore a file, service or process in. An RTO of 24 hours means if a disaster strikes at 3pm, it won’t be available until 3pm the next day.

WRT
WRT, or Work Recovery Time, determines the maximum amount of time needed to verify files, services or processes have been restored correctly and are available for use.

MTD
Maximum Tolerable Downtime – the TOTAL amount of time that each process or service can be disrupted before it threatens the survival of the business. The sum of the Recovery Time Objective & Work Recovery Time must always be less than Maximum Tolerable Downtime.

Retention Period
Retention Periods define how long you store backups for. The longer you keep old backups for, the further back you’ll be able to recover data from. However, you need to ensure this meets your company’s legal & compliance obligations.

Disaster Recovery
Disaster Recovery or DR goes beyond the simple backup & restore strategy. The objective of Disaster Recovery planning is to ensure the survival of a company when a disaster hits.
PC Comms – New Services:
Whilst we are already maintaining & managing backup services for many of our customers, we thought we’d also take the time to introduce our new improved backup services: https://www.pccomms.net/services/online-backups/
Visit the official World Backup Day website