Most enterprises rely on your best practices and personal habits to protect your individual files between backups. Standard backup procedures capture network files periodically to prevent catastrophic loss. However, backups do not track modifications, renaming, and deletions you make to files in between backups. You might employ different techniques to ensure that you do not lose critical files. For example, you might save multiple versions of a file under different names as you modify it over time. You might save the file in different locations. You might do both.
Despite precautions, almost every user has accidentally modified, lost, or deleted a key file. When problems occur, you are left with two choices:
Wait for the administrator to recover the file from backup media, if the file was backed up at all.
Painstakingly rebuild the file from draft versions or from scratch.
Whenever you lose a file, you and your company lose the time and resources invested in creating the data in it. Both file recovery and reconstruction efforts waste valuable resources:
It’s inefficient. You cannot access backup files without administrator action.
It’s inconvenient. You must waste time re-creating materials.
It’s costly. Data loss can affect the enterprise’s ability to meet business commitments. Time lost can impact your ability to meet milestones, thereby impacting delivery to other processes down the line.
Most enterprises implement some type of system-level data backup and recovery to prevent against major data losses. Backups occur periodically to prevent catastrophic losses of data. Often, the files you lose have a life cycle shorter than the major backup cycles. Until now, these data losses have been an unfortunate cost of doing business.
Recovery of a single file is not a simple process. Only the administrator can access the backup media to retrieve and recover the file. You must know exactly when the file existed so that the administrator can find the right version of the file.
Even after the file is recovered, you must update the file with changes made between the time it was backed up until the time it was modified, deleted, or lost.