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Writer's picturePateh Kotaks

Preventing Data Loss: Failover System and Redundancy

How we can prevent data loss in a proper way

Did you ever experienced your files disappear after PLN suddenly shut the electricity which also kill your PC? Well, it is called data loss.

Data loss occurs when valuable or sensitive information on a computer is compromised due to theft, human error, viruses, malware, or power failure. It may also occur due to physical damage or mechanical failure or equipment of an edifice (Frankenfield, 2022). Theft of laptops, unintentional file deletion or overwriting, power surges, liquid spills, and hard drive wear and tear are some of the leading causes of data loss. Data recovery is made feasible in the case of data loss by regularly backing up files. Professional recovery services could be able to retrieve lost data for data that hasn't been backed up.

In general, there are two common methods to prevent data loss

  1. Failover System: Failover is the mechanism, be it automatic or manual, for bringing up a contingent operational plan. Capability to seamlessly switch to a backup system. This can be operated in a redundant manner or in a standby operational mode upon the failure of a primary server, application, system or other primary system component.

  2. Redundancy: The situation of having the identical piece of data stored in two different locations is known as data redundancy and is generated by databases or other data storage technologies. This can refer to two distinct areas in various software systems or platforms, or two distinct fields inside a same database. Redundant data is essentially any data that has been repeated.

Tech company often use high availability systems to prevent such data loss. "High availability" systems are computational environments created to operate at almost full-time availability. A system with high availability strives to maintain an agreed-upon level of operational performance, often uptime, for longer than usual. These systems frequently had redundant hardware and software, allowing them to function even in the event of failures. Since every hardware or software component that might fail has an identical backup component, well-designed high availability systems eliminate single points of failure.

Availability is generally presented as a percentage indicating how much uptime is expected from a particular system or component over a given period. A value of 100% would indicate that the system never fails. A system that guarantees 99% availability in a one-year period can have up to 3.65 days of downtime (1%). These values are calculated based on multiple factors, including both scheduled and unscheduled maintenance periods, as well as the recovery time from a possible system failure. The most common availability in an SLA (Service Level Agreement) is 99.999% (“five nines”)—5.26 minutes of downtime per year (Lutkevich & Gillis, 2021)


Reference

Frankenfield, J. (2022, August 14). What is data loss? Investopedia. Retrieved August 31, 2022, from https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/data-loss.asp

Lutkevich, B., & Gillis, A. S. (2021, April 15). What is high availability? - definition from whatis.com. SearchDataCenter. Retrieved August 31, 2022, from https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatacenter/definition/high-availability



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