Backup is a very important task that many organizations undertake. There are different approaches that data backup can take which include full, incremental and differential approaches. For a single site university, as a database administrator, I would ensure that the beginning of every semester, I will perform a full backup. I will make sure that all the files and folders that are used in the university are backed up. The finance departments will have to have a daily backup using the differential backup approach. This will ensure that the financial transactions that take place in these departments are backed up. Information systems and their associated logs will be backed up on a weekly basis. In addition, to be backed up on a weekly basis is the research reports and theses for professors and students. The user accounts will be backed up on a monthly basis. The user-profiles are stored in the domain server. My policy will be that users change their passwords monthly so that security is also assured. The user accounts will be backed up basing on a differential basis.
For a retail store, the backup will be done on a daily basis. This is because there are many activities that take place in this business model. There are new customers got daily, new debts, credits and new cash inflows. They will all require a consistent backup to be done. For the finance department, I will undertake an initial full backup and differential backups on a daily basis. This will enable me to capture new transactions that are done daily. For the other departments like human resource and payroll, I will perform a weekly data backup basing on a differential approach.
For the above backup, I will make sure that we have offsite storage where the backups are saved. This will ensure that there is a continuous availability of data in case there is a disaster in the organization.
Bibliography
Nelson, S. (2010). Pro data backup and recovery. New Jersey: Apress.
