Backing up files is the minimum way an organization protects itself against the loss of data in a system or computer crash.

Backup schemes today can be so sophisticated that a malfunction in a computer or network is barely noticed. Systems are described as Fault Tolerant? and redundant? when every critical resource, cpu, memory, storage, network, are all duplicated so there is no single point of failure.

Backup methods include:

Physical mirroring? of hard drives, plus regular transfers of data to optical or tape storage.

Synchronization of files?, across networks to different physical locations, and replication? of databases on remote servers.

In the unlikely case of the loss of a system, a new system can be restored from the backup files. This is called Data Recovery?.