Backup vs Disaster Recovery: what is the difference and why does your company need both?
It is common to hear “we have backup, so we are protected.” But backup and disaster recovery solve different problems, and confusing the two is one of the reasons companies discover too late that they were not prepared for a major failure. Understanding the difference between the two concepts is the first step to building a business continuity strategy that actually works when something goes wrong.
What is backup?
Backup is the copy of your data, made at regular intervals, stored in a location separate from the original environment. It exists to respond to a specific problem: the loss or corruption of data. An employee deletes a table by mistake, a file is corrupted, ransomware encrypts files. In these cases, backup allows you to restore the information to an earlier point in time.
Backup protects the data, but not necessarily the operation. If the entire server goes down, or if an entire cloud region becomes unavailable, having only the saved files does not guarantee that the system will come back up quickly.
What is Disaster Recovery?
Disaster Recovery, or DR, is the plan and infrastructure that ensure the operation comes back up after a major event: the outage of an entire data center, the failure of an AWS region, a cyberattack that takes down critical systems, or any incident that takes the application offline.
While backup answers “how do I recover the data,” DR answers “how does my system come back up, and in how much time.” This involves infrastructure replicas, contingency environments, failover automations, and a tested plan, not just stored files.
The main differences in practice
Backup focuses on data. DR focuses on the availability of the operation as a whole, including application, database, network, and infrastructure.
Backup has an execution frequency, usually daily or hourly. DR works with two central indicators: RTO, the maximum acceptable time to restore the operation, and RPO, the maximum amount of data the company can lose in the event of a failure.
Backup, on its own, can take hours or days to restore an entire environment from scratch. A well-designed DR plan reduces this time to minutes, depending on the strategy chosen.
Why does your company need both?
Having only backup without a DR plan means that, in the event of a major incident, the company is left without operation for an indefinite time while it tries to rebuild everything from the saved files. Having only a DR strategy without a solid backup routine leaves the company exposed to data loss day to day, even outside a disaster scenario.
In practice, backup and DR complement each other. Backup ensures the data is not lost. DR ensures that, even in the face of a major failure, the operation comes back up within a timeframe the business can withstand, without relying on luck.
How to know if your company is really protected?
A few simple questions help identify gaps: does your company know, today, how long it would take to restore the entire operation after a major failure? Is there a contingency environment ready to take over, or does everything depend on rebuilding from scratch? Has the recovery plan already been tested in practice, or does it only exist on paper?
If the answer to any of these questions is “I don’t know” or “we’re not sure,” it is a sign that it is worth reviewing the company’s data protection and business continuity strategy.
CloudDog, as an AWS Advanced Partner, helps companies structure backup and disaster recovery in the cloud, with RTO and RPO defined according to the criticality of each application. Learn about our Backup and Disaster Recovery service and understand the level of protection your operation has today.
