Even with RAID configurations, replication, and cloud redundancy, backups remain essential because corruption, viruses, and data errors can propagate across all live copies simultaneously. A dedicated backup strategy ensures earlier, clean versions of data are always recoverable.
Backup Fundamentals
With RAID configurations and replications, in some ways it might seem like we might not need backup at all. Our information, especially up in the cloud, has become very durable, which means that it's very unlikely that we're going to lose any information. It is just rock solid, let me tell you. But there still is a need for backup, and so it's important that we have some sort of backup plan in place.
Let's say we have a very solid database that's being replicated over, so we have duplicate copies, so that if something goes down, then immediately we're still back up and running. The problem with this is that if information gets corrupted on one, there's a high probability that'll get corrupted on the other. And corruption does happen on these databases. Corruption does happen on files. Viruses happen on files. And if we don't have an earlier version, an earlier backup of those, then it can be problematic. So backup is going to be very critical, that we have at least a copy of that. And it is so important, and there is so much to backups, that I'm going to create a whole another module on it, because it's a pretty large topic.
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