Backup & Disaster Recovery Flashcards

What does 'data deduplication' accomplish in backup systems?

Answer: Eliminates redundant data to reduce storage consumption

Deduplication identifies and removes duplicate data segments, storing only unique chunks to significantly reduce backup storage requirements.

What is a grandfather-father-son (GFS) backup rotation scheme?

Answer: A method using three generations of backup media on daily, weekly, and monthly cycles

GFS rotation keeps daily (son), weekly (father), and monthly (grandfather) backups, providing a layered retention policy that balances storage cost with recovery options.

Which term describes the practice of storing backup copies in a geographically separate location from the primary data?

Answer: Offsite backup

Offsite backup ensures that a disaster affecting the primary location—such as fire or flood—cannot destroy both the production data and its backup simultaneously.

What is the main risk of relying solely on RAID for data protection?

Answer: RAID does not protect against accidental deletion, ransomware, or controller failure

RAID protects against drive hardware failure but cannot recover from logical errors like accidental deletion, corruption, or ransomware that overwrites the live data.

In cloud disaster recovery, what does 'pilot light' mean?

Answer: Maintaining a minimal core environment ready to scale up quickly during a disaster

A pilot light setup keeps only the most critical components (like databases) running in the cloud so they can be quickly scaled into a full environment when needed.

What is the purpose of backup verification or backup integrity testing?

Answer: To confirm that backed-up data can actually be restored successfully

Backup verification ensures that the backed-up data is not corrupted and can be fully restored, preventing the discovery of unusable backups only when disaster strikes.

Which of the following best describes 'continuous data protection' (CDP)?

Answer: Capturing every data change in real time to enable recovery to any point in time

CDP records every write operation as it occurs, allowing recovery to any specific moment rather than just scheduled backup points.