In our two previous articles, we have discussed various backup options available to you, their advantages and disadvantages. If you haven’t read the articles, here are the links. (Part I), (Part II)

When deciding which backup option to purchase for your CCTV camera surveillance system, it is very important to consider what type of backup is best suited to the needs of your organization in particular. Here are a few questions that you should brainstorm prior to making your purchase decision.

• What is the recovery time according to your SLA (Service Level Agreements)?
• What does your business continuity plan (BCP) state with respect to backup and recovery?
• What are the policies regarding storing backup tapes offsite?  In case the backups are being shipped offsite, incremental backups would be a very bad idea since you have to get all the tapes of the various backups before you can begin a restoration and recovery.
• Is it a hot site or wet site? 
• Whether backup is real time or periodic?
• What type of backups does your system support?
• What kind of redundancy is involved and what is its cost to the organization? It is important to consider the trade-off between having security of data in multiple copies of the backup and the cost of maintaining such multiple backup files.
  
  

There are many more questions that come to mind, however, the underlined point here is that deciding a backup option requires careful thought and analysis. While full backup and incremental backup go a long way towards modernizing the entire backup process, there remains a need to examine the organization processes and data so that you can choose the best type of backup option for your organization. 

For home users and mobile users, it is ideal to sync your data with your email account or on email account linked cloud storage like Drop Box or Google Drive. These provide inexpensive ways to automatic backup of your most important files with periodic updates without any complexities of tiresome processes and technical knowledge.