If you have ever had a panic attack after losing important data, you would understand the significance of backing up data. Wearing out hard drives, old hardware, data getting corrupted, and computers getting stolen, lost or destroyed are all unfortunate but usual events.
The cloud is reliable, super-fast, but limited. Even a huge amount of storage space will run out oneday if you don’t properly organizze your data and sweep it for duplicates.
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If you are a business person, losing data may cause you to lose clients as well. Even if the data was personal, it is likely that a lot of sentiments were attached to the lost data. To avoid such problems, experts always recommend frequent backups.
Types of Backup
File Level Backup
Owing to its simplicity, the mostly widely known, understood, and used backup type is the file level backup. Here, the backup software goes through each and every file. Even if there has been a minute change in a file, the whole file is backed up.
This works well if the data is not too large. However, if you are using this type of backup for large, organizational data, it might cost you additional time.
Block Level Backup
Block level backup is a modern and more effective method to create backups, especially for larger organizations. A block level backup software application analyzes source files and identifies any changes made to those files. If a file has been modified, only the modifications will be backed up, instead of the whole file as in the case of file level backup. Instead of databases, block level backup tools read data directly from the disk.
To perform such an action, block level backup tools use screenshot technology. Data is read in fixed sized blocks. The parameters for the blocks can also be set up the software developers. For instance, a file ranging between 1 MB – 512 GB can be split into blocks of 128 KB. Similarly, a file that falls into the range of 512 MB to 1024 GB can be split into blocks of 256 KB. When it comes to images, the block size is usually set as low as 1 MB.
Note: These values vary per tool/software application.
Once this is done, using hashes, the newly created boxes are compared with the initial ones. If a difference is observed, the new blocks are added to the backup repository.
Pros
Since less data is being transferred, block level backup is known for having lesser impact on a machine’s performance. This saves a lot of resources, mainly time and storage space, which means that you could run backups more frequently.
Since block level backups use screenshot technology, a file that is currently in use can also be analyzed and backed up if required.
Cons
While recovering data after a block level backup, it may take more time. Moreover, some experts consider this method to be less reliable or consistent. If a hash function goes wrong, your changes won’t be backed up correctly. Similarly, if a single block becomes inconsistent, you will lose your access to the entire file.
With each passing day, humans’ dependence on computers is increasing. Owing to this, it has become quite crucial to maintain efficient backing up systems if we want to ensure cyberspace security. If your data set isn’t too large, file system backups can be suitable. However, in case you have data that’s abundant, you should definitely consider block level backups.