So as to protect your data against corruption or loss, you should ensure an effective data copy in hand. In terms of copying data, many are not clear about data backup and sync. This article will compare them and offer you some suggestion in selecting.
Nowadays, data is all around. In the meantime, data loss is occurring all the time as well. Therefore, for the sakes of averting data loss, you should backing up your data in that it’ll contribute a lot in future data recovery. For instance, when your PST file is corrupted, if you have PST backups, you can easily recover PST data via backups.
When it comes to data backup, many users may confuse backup and sync. Both of them are frequently interchanged, but actually they still have many distinctions from each other. Plus, often, they can make different impacts on data protection. Thus, you’d better figure out them as soon as possible.
1. Data Backup
When you back up your computer, your data is copied from the computer hard drive to the other location. It can be a physical external hard drive or the cloud and so on. And your subsequent actions on the original data on the computer will not make any effects on the backed up data. For instance, if you’ve backed up file “A” to an external drive, even though you later delete the original file “A” on the PC, it still exists in the backups.
2. Data Sync
In brief, data sync is just a mirror effect. That is to say, when you sync a file, you are actually maintaining an identical file and update the existing files in two or more locations. Hence, if you make any changes on the original data, the changes will be auto applied to the synced data. For example, if you’ve synced file “A” to the cloud, when you delete the file “A” in the source place, the next time for sync, the file “A” will be auto deleted from the cloud as well.
3. Comparison
Based on what mentioned above, we will compare data backup and data sync in the following two aspects:
1) Time & Speed
If you generally run a full data backup, namely copying all data, in this case, data sync may be more dominant. It is because that sync will be able to automatically escape the unchanged files. Therefore, it’ll be capable of reducing the total time for data sync, which must be less than the time for full backup.
2) Deletion & Recovery
Although data sync may be faster than full backup, it still has many drawbacks. One of them is that you will get in danger of accidental deletion. As mentioned in the above, data sync will automatically delete the synced files which have been deleted from the source. More specifically, if you delete a file in the source, the next time when sync runs, the file will be deleted from the destination. This will cause data loss and reduce the chance of data recovery drastically.
Depending on the above, it is more advisable to choose data backup. If you prefer data sync, you had better select the specific sync software which will warn you before it delete or change files.
Author Introduction:
Shirley Zhang is a data recovery expert in DataNumen, Inc., which is the world leader in data recovery technologies, including recover sql and outlook repair software products. For more information visit www.datanumen.com
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