Author: George Williams / Source: The Next Web

The concept of backup is as old as data itself. The technology associated with it has traveled a long distance coming from floppy disks, backup CDs and DVDs, then USBs and now to dedicated backup appliances and offsite or remote backup repositories.
Unlike the past, backup technology is now on a completely different scale.
The backup market has seen explosive growth over the last few years and a number of reports suggest a stable continuation of the rise in the market growth rate.According to a Global Forecast about the Data Backup and Recovery market by PRNewswire, published in Dec, 2017: the backup and recovery market is expected to grow from $7.13 billion in 2017 to $11.59 billion by 2022.
Similarly, a market share analysis by Gartner; published in August 2017, states that the backup and recovery software market has displayed accelerated growth from 5.5 percent in 2015 to 7.1 percent in 2016. Safe to say, backup technologies are hip and they’re going to stay hip at least till 2022; and probably afterwards too.
The giants backing the backup and recovery market
The impeccable growth rate of the backup and recovery market is no surprise. Over the last decade, giants have aggressively partaken in this industry and set the standards for innovation and service provision.
The names of tech giants empowering the backup market include, but are not limited to:
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Microsoft Corporation
- Oracle Corporation
- IBM Corporation
- EMC Corporation
- Google Inc.
- VMware Inc.
- Dropbox Inc.
- StoneFly Inc.
- Barracuda Networks, Inc.
- Veeam Software
- Druva Software
- Code42 Software Inc.
It’s pretty clear at this point that backup technology is facilitated by tech giants and relied upon by businesses around the globe.
The question remains: what’s the big deal about it anyways?
Differentiating data redundancy and data backups
Before indulging into the types of backup technologies, a concept deserves an honorable mention: data redundancy. Data redundancy is often confused with backup services, so it’s important to draw a line between it and data backups.
Data redundancy is simply the creation of replicas of data. In other words, you’re creating the same file in multiple locations. An example of this would be creating a file on your local system and then copying it on a USB flash drive; each time you update it. This is not the same as backup.
Backups are compressed version of the original data that you create. Usually, third party software creates these backups for you and the same software can use those files to restore them.
To clarify this, let’s say I gave you two files: one is the exact copy of your original file and the other is a backup file of that original data. You can use the copy as soon as it’s on your local system. For the backup file, you’ll need the software that created…
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