What is backup and what is the purpose of backup?

Backup is the act of creating archives of files, folders or disks in order to preserve their contents in an event of a system crash, major hardware failure or a unforeseen disaster that may damage or completely destroy data stored on a storage media.

Backup is performed mainly by administrators in corporate and organizational computer networks in order to safeguard business continuity and to minimize the risk of data loss.

However, more and more personal users are aware of the necessity of creating backups in order to preserve their important personal files such as financial statements, digital work or family pictures stored on a disk.

There are numerous backup and restore tools available to both business and personal customers such as Norton Ghost or Symantec Ghost Solution Suite that provide very high level of security of data.