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CompTIA Security+ 3.4 CompTIA Security+ 5.2
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What Would the Schedule Lose?

Read a layered backup schedule and work out what a failure would lose, or whether it meets its RPO.

⚑ Complete this interactive to capture a CTF flag worth 5 points.

About this interactive

How often you back up comes down to how much information you are willing to lose. If the RPO is 15 minutes, a backup has to run at least every 15 minutes; with a looser RPO, backups can be further apart. Backing everything up all the time is unrealistic, so schedules are layered: servers weekly or monthly, databases hourly or even continuously, and sometimes hourly, daily and weekly backups of the same database. To check a schedule, find the longest gap between two backups, including overnight and over the weekend. A failure just before the next backup loses that whole gap, and that is what has to fit inside the RPO.

What you'll learn

Aligned to

CompTIA Security+
3.4 Explain the importance of resilience and recovery in security architecture.
5.2 Explain elements of the risk management process.

Key terms

Backup Frequency
How often backup jobs are scheduled to run, determined by the criticality of the data, the organization's Recovery Point Objective (RPO), and available storage resources. Higher-frequency backups reduce the amount of data that can be lost in an incident.
Layered Backup Schedule
A backup strategy that combines multiple backup intervals such as hourly, daily, and weekly to balance data protection with operational and storage constraints.
Continuous Backup
A backup method that captures data changes in real time or near real time, minimizing potential data loss for critical systems.
Recovery Point Objective
RPO
The maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time, defining how far back data must be recoverable.

Topics

Interactive Calculation

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