CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide

them.
Another big question is how much data you can afford to store. Storage is
cheap, but the cost of storing many copies of frequent backups still adds up
fast. Different backup methods and software use many strategies—such as
compression, deduplication, incremental backups that only record changes
since the previous backup, and so on—to cut down on the amount of data
stored.
It’s also common to discard all but one backup for a given period of time
as the backups age. You might keep hourly backups for the most recent day,
but only keep one per day for the rest of the week, one a week for the rest of
the month, one a month for the rest of the year, and then keep a single backup
per year thereafter. You have to be careful with incremental backups, though:
restoring a specific incremental backup requires an unbroken chain of
incremental backups from the last full backup.
Here’s a scenario for a CompTIA A+ tech handling backup options. Chris
at Bayland Widgets is responsible for maintaining the data for the accounting
department, which consists of four Windows 10 workstations and a file
server with critical accounting data. It’s not a huge department, but one that’s
absolutely essential for company operations. Chris needs to get it right. Let’s
look at file-level backups, critical application backups, and image-level
backups.
File Level File-level backups are a simple way to make sure important files
and directories get backed up. Anyone can perform the most basic file-level
backup without special software: just manually select a file or folder and
copy it to an external drive, like a USB thumb drive (see Figure 28-6), or
cloud-based account, like Dropbox. From a user standpoint, this means each
of the accountants would save copies of their personal files elsewhere. In
such a scenario, Chris would make sure the accountants have access to an
external drive or install and configure Dropbox on their machines.