What is backup?

Backup is the process of creating copies of data to enable recovery in the event of data loss, corruption, or unauthorized modification. Backup protects information systems against hardware failures, human errors, cyberattacks, and ransomware.

Key parameters:

• RPO (Recovery Point Objective) — the acceptable amount of data loss measured in time (defines backup frequency);
• RTO (Recovery Time Objective) — the target recovery time (defines the architecture and speed of recovery).

Modern solutions use incremental and differential methods, deduplication, compression, encryption, and immutable storage that prevents deletion or modification of backups even in case of compromise. Backup can be performed at the level of virtual machines, applications, databases, or files, with support for snapshots, replication, and air-gapped or logically isolated environments. In production environments, backup is integrated with monitoring, orchestration automation, and regular recovery testing to ensure reliability and compliance with requirements (including compliance standards and ransomware resilience).