Does What You Backed Up Cover It?

About this interactive

The lesson treats what you back up as levels. At one end is a whole virtual machine; at the other, a single file; between them, databases, the system state, files and folders, and directory information. Each level has a cost. Back up just the files, and losing the whole system means building it again before the files can go back. Back up the whole machine with a tool that can restore only whole machines, and getting one file back means restoring the machine first. (Many image tools can also pull single files out of an image; check what yours can do.) When servers are deployed from code, the servers themselves may not need backing up, only their configuration. The levels do not have to match: a busy database might be backed up daily and static web servers weekly.

What you'll learn

Judge whether a backup taken at a given level (whole virtual machine, system state, database, files and folders) restores a given loss in one step or needs a rebuild or a larger restore first

Aligned to

CompTIA Security+

3.4 Explain the importance of resilience and recovery in security architecture.

Key terms

Backup Granularity: The level of detail at which data is backed up, ranging from individual files to full virtual machines, which affects both recovery speed and storage requirements.
Virtual Machine: A software emulation of a physical computer that runs an operating system and applications.

Topics

Interactive Streak Sort

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