What Is Data Recovery?

Data recovery is restoring data lost or damaged due to unplanned incidents or outages. Data is stored on servers, hard disks, removable media, and devices. It can be lost, damaged, corrupted, or inadvertently deleted due to various causes—such as old storage hardware failing, malicious software, or incorrect data manipulation. The data recovery process restores the data from a backup copy made in the past. Data recovery is part of a comprehensive disaster recovery strategy essential for business continuity and maintaining regular operations despite mistakes and failures.

Data loss and corruption can affect physical data storage and processing hardware, such as solid-state drives, tape drives, and virtual infrastructure, like virtual servers. Situations that can lead to data loss include:

• Cyber security incidents
• Equipment failure
• Accidental deletion
• Data corruption
• Natural disasters

Data loss events can strike at any time. Consider a server housing critical data like customer projects, company financial information, or plans for future work. It experiences some failure. What happens next? Are there backups of that data? How long until critical service restoration? How long until all services are fully restored?

A data recovery plan, processes, and systems - including backups - address all these business-critical questions. Data recovery provides a clear path forward and timelines in case of disaster. It is a crucial part of disaster recovery—a critical organizational strategic activity.

A data backup is a copy of file, system, configuration, or application data stored separately from the original. It contains a restorable copy of data or a system snapshot. Any data since a given save point may be lost, but a backup offers a working, older copy to restore.

It’s possible to create a full backup of certain data and then perform incremental backups at specified times, such as hourly, daily, or weekly. Critical systems are typically continually backed up with incremental backup. For example, a banking system would add each verified transaction to multiple data backups so that money is never unaccounted for.

Backup and recovery go hand in hand. You can recover data from a backup, but without backups, recovery is impossible.

Data recovery includes everything from the recovery of just one accidentally deleted file to an entire virtualized IT infrastructure.

File data

File data is stored in file systems on physical or virtual servers or a storage device like a Solid State Drive (SSD). File systems may also include shared storage, such as storage area networks (SANs). Images, videos, and documents are critical for business processes and must be backed up for prompt recovery.

Device data and configurations

Data stored on devices such as laptops, phones, and IoT devices requires different backup methods than traditional file storage. Data localized to a single device is at greater risk of loss if the device is broken, stolen, or lost. The data and device configurations should be backed up to quickly restore the device environment on another machine.

Application data and configurations

Applications store and update data from various sources, such as databases, warehouses, and lakes. Application data is continuously changing at scale, but without data access, applications shut down rapidly and can significantly impact business processes. To reduce application downtime, both application data and configurations must be backed up and recoverable.

Systems configurations

Describing systems in code form through Infrastructure as Code (IaC) outlines a blueprint for technical systems and their interconnections. For instance, an internal network configuration and VPN as code allow a business to create an internal network entirely through code and the cloud. If this configuration is lost, the system itself must be rebuilt from scratch. By backing up system configurations via IaC, businesses can restore infrastructure from this data quickly and easily.

Recovering data from a data loss incident as quickly and thoroughly as possible is most manageable when there is a comprehensive disaster recovery strategy in place. Within the wider disaster recovery strategy, organizations create a disaster recovery playbook. This playbook outlines the key contacts, systems, timings, and steps involved in recovering data from the moment data loss is discovered or suspected.

Some key steps in the disaster recovery playbook are given below.

Identify and classify data

Data across a business is not equal in terms of business criticality, and some data may even escape any backups whatsoever. For example, a business’s ERP software may be considered critical to daily operations. In contrast, an HR system may be less necessary and less time-sensitive. All employee browser history may be regarded as unimportant enough to lose.

Determine recovery objectives

Next, you must determine recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs).

• RPO is the minimum age of a backup (e.g., days, minutes, or seconds in critical systems)
• RTO is the minimum period required for the data recovery process.

Other considerations include how many historical backups to retain and the oldest backup necessary. You can use RPOs and RTOs to determine the type of backup required and the service provider to choose, guided by service-level agreement terms (SLAs).

Establish systems

Organizations often use the 3-2-1 rule for data backups to ensure maximum availability across all types of data loss incidents. This rule says to store at least three copies of the data across at least two different storage types, with at least one of the copies off-site. Some organizations also choose to maintain a fully offline backup to protect against all network vulnerabilities.

Data recovery planning requires you to document the following

• Data classifications
• Roles
• Processes
• Steps
• Timeline of tasks
• Systems involved

The documentation is regularly updated as data, backup, or recovery requirements change. The plan also outlines various scenarios for different data loss incidents and the best data recovery methods for each scenario.

Test the plan

With a disaster playbook and scenarios in place, systems and automation must be created, switched on, and data recovery software tested to ensure they work as expected and according to the playbook. Testing backup and recovery software and systems regularly ensures that all systems are operating as expected and that there are no hidden surprises that might disrupt real data recovery processes.

Data recovery methods vary based on the data backup type and format.

Physical storage data recovery

Physical storage remains a popular backup medium for organizations of all sizes. Physical storage ranges from hard drives to servers and even tape backups. Organizations use specific backup tools to create copies of data and store them on physical storage devices either on-premise or off-site.

Cloud backup data recovery

While organizations have chosen to backup to managed data centers for many years, now there is also the option to backup to the cloud. Cloud backups are stored on virtual servers distributed across regions or in a specific region of choice. While the cloud service provider manages much of the backup infrastructure, organizations must still configure their cloud backup solutions correctly to ensure correct operation during data recovery.

Data recovery software

When backup copies haven’t been made or are lost or corrupted themselves, organizations can attempt to use data recovery software and services directly on the device or virtual device that housed the missing or corrupted data. Specialized data recovery software tools vary in the degree of recovery that is possible, depending on the data, storage type, operating system, time passed, and other variables. Software recovery should never be considered a primary method among data recovery techniques. Trying to perform logical data recovery on corrupted system data is expensive with a limited rate of success. It is best to prioritise recovery from backup copies only.

AWS offers world-class cloud backup and data recovery solutions alongside hybrid backup configurations. We support organizations in business continuity and successful data recovery to avoid data loss. Organizations can choose any AWS storage solutions, like Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), and Amazon FSx, for self-managed backup and recovery.

You can also use AWS Backup as a managed solution. All you have to do is define a central data protection policy called a backup plan that works across AWS services for compute, storage, and databases. The backup plan defines parameters such as backup frequency and backup retention period. Once you define your data protection policies and assign AWS resources to the policies, AWS Backup automates the creation of backups and stores those backups in an encrypted backup vault that you designate.

Organizations can choose AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery for reliable backup and recovery of running on-premise or cloud business applications. It minimizes downtime and data loss with fast, reliable recovery using affordable storage, minimal compute, and point-in-time recovery.

Get started with data backup and recovery on AWS by creating a free account today.