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By 2025, the world will generate 463 exabytes of data<\/a> every day. That\u2019s more or less as much data as one million storage pods<\/a>. This alone should underscore why being savvy about your online data storage will only become more important in coming years.<\/p>\n To the uninitiated, archiving may sound like another form of data storage: by backing up your files, you are also archiving them. Surprisingly, that\u2019s not the case. Here\u2019s the short story on the difference between these two concepts.<\/p>\n Backups<\/strong> provide for recovering data from hardware failure, data corruption, or other loss.<\/p>\n Archive<\/strong> helps you manage space limitations and long-term data retention.<\/p>\n So, if you are eyeing your own ever-expanding data footprint and wondering where and how to securely store it all, we have a few things to tell you about the difference between archiving and backup functions.<\/p>\n In this blog post, we cover how each of these data storage methods help to ensure that data is:<\/p>\n The goal of a backup is to make a copy of any file that you currently use and cannot afford to lose. Typically, backups are made regularly or when the original data changes. The original file is preserved, while older backups (iterations) are deleted in favor of newer backups.<\/p>\n Any machine that stores valuable data\u2014like computers, servers, VMs, and mobile devices\u2014should be backed up. Backups can include data, operating systems (OS), and application files, or a combination of these depending on your backup approach.<\/p>\n A backup of a desktop or mobile device might include just the user data so that a previous version of a file is recoverable if necessary, while the OS and applications can quickly be restored from original sources if necessary (although you should know that restoring an OS to a new device could lead to significant corruption issues).<\/p>\n In a virtual server environment, a backup could include There are lots of things to consider when you\u2019re creating a solid server backup strategy. Use our guide to learn how to safeguard your server data with backups that preserve your information in case of disaster.<\/p>\n\n
Why Back Up Your Data?<\/h2>\n
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Backup Uses<\/h3>\n
.VMDK<\/code> files that contain data and the OS as well as both structured (database) and unstructured data (files). This way, the system can be put back into service as quickly as possible if something happens to the original VM in a VMware, Hyper-V, or another virtual machine environment.<\/p>\n\nGet Your Guide to Server Backup<\/h4>\n
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