19.11 Backup Strategies

Original work by Lowell Gilbert.

The first requirement in devising a backup plan is to make sure that all of the following problems are covered:

It is perfectly possible that some systems will be best served by having each of these problems covered by a completely different technique. Except for strictly personal systems with very low-value data, it is unlikely that one technique would cover all of them.

Some of the techniques in the toolbox are:

It is quite easy to come up with even more techniques, many of them variations on the ones listed above. Specialized requirements will usually lead to specialized techniques (for example, backing up a live database usually requires a method particular to the database software as an intermediate step). The important thing is to know what dangers you want to protect against, and how you will handle each.