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CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide

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hauling a shipping container stuffed to the gills with over 100,000 terabytes

of data storage capacity—if you’re looking to transfer massive data sets in or

out of the cloud. If you really mean business, they’ll even throw in a security

escort vehicle.

Local storage provides the opposite experience. First off, you don’t need

the Internet (or even space to park a semi-truck), only local media. Mass

storage drives are inexpensive and easily implemented, so local storage

works great for both image backups and file backups.

The drawback to relying on local storage is that it provides zero protection

from local disasters. I’m in Houston, Texas, home of semi-regular hurricanes.

So far my company has not been swiped by one, but the danger is always

there, May to November of each year. Relying on local backups for our

intellectual property would mean running the risk of losing everything each

hurricane season.

Consequently, we do both types of backups, as do many organizations. It’s

a little more complicated, but using both cloud and local storage options—the

former for critical data, the latter for typical daily backups—means our stuff

is secure. This is a good thing!

Backup Testing

Expect a question or two on the CompTIA A+ 1002 exam about backup

testing or verifying a backup. The rule is: always verify your backups. You

could easily invest a dozen years of time and money taking daily backups and

following best practices like storing encrypted copies in multiple physical

locations and cloud accounts, only to discover—when disaster strikes—that

you can’t successfully recover the files or disk images they contain. Backup

strategies that don’t involve verifying your backups are just fancy makebelieve.

You might as well leave your failed hard drives under your pillow

for the tooth fairy.

Unfortunately, verifying backups isn’t as simple as it sounds. The gold

standard is being able to restore whatever you backed up—whether files or

disk images—and end up with exactly what you think you have. Reality is

tricky, though. Imagine, as soon as you take a backup, you compare the

backup with the files on disk to make sure they’re identical. If files on your

disk are corrupt, verifying the backup just guarantees that you’ve

meticulously copied the corrupt files.

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