This blog series will be about backups. In various articles, we will dive deep into backups and everything that’s related to it. Each article will shed some light on a different aspect and after reading this, you will have a better understanding of backups and its surroundings.
  
Before we dig in, we are going to give you a small list of the subject that will be covered:

• Reasons to make backups
• Basic concepts of backups
• The different media, used to store backups
• Backup solutions
• Best practices

Now that we have given you a small glance about this series, let’s jump off to the first part.

Reasons to make backups

If we define backups superficially, it boils down to this: you make a copy of important data, that you could use whenever something bad happens or whenever necessary. (More about the definition of backups in part 2 of the series).

There are many reasons as to why one should make backups. Let’s name a few:

• Audits: whether internal or external, keeping a copy of a known state is always helpful when an audit would happen
• Archiving
• Mitigating the amount of downtime and saving time when recovering from downtime
• Economic reasons: if you have a business and you lose important data, this might end up in enormous problems, such as financial loss
• Reputation and trust: if you have a business, protecting it and its assets is extremely important
• Keeping memories: while this is more a reason of sentiment, it’s likely an important reason of “regular” people that have data that they have given a lot of personal weight.

In the end, all the named reasons above, lead to the one big thing that is probably the main reason for backups and that’s data loss. With backups, a mechanism is available that can help in data loss prevention. Whether it’s sensitive company data or some family and holiday pictures, the loss of data is that one scenario that everyone wants to avoid.

In a steadily growing digital world, it’s almost becoming impossible to avoid the many events that could end up in negative consequences for IT infrastructure and environments. But what are the many threats that could cause problems to a computer or a network? Let’s list some of them:

• Malware, such as a virus, a trojan or ransomware
• System failure
• Human errors
• Data corruption
• A software or a hardware error
• An aging system or device
• Hacking

Some might appear as obvious, some might not. Nevertheless, there’s no reason to think that any of these reasons would not present any danger through the course of time.

As you can conclude from this comprehensive article, there are a lot of reasons that emphasize the importance of backups. Now that you know about this, it’s time to delve into the definition of backups and basic concepts connected to it, subjects that will be discussed in part 2: basic concepts of backups.