In the best of circumstances, backups and archives will never be needed. However, data represents an investment of time and effort, and you should take measures to ensure your unique data against loss. Hard-drive failures, software bugs, and user errors can wreak havoc, deleting or corrupting important information. In mission-critical applications, lost or inaccessible data can mean the difference between meeting deadlines and satisfying customers or defaulting on a myriad of vital business responsibilities.
Timely, consistent, and reliable backups are an extremely important aspect of system administration. In this module, you will learn how to protect your data using appropriate backup applications and scheduling. Additionally, you will use the file recovery facilities available in the tar utility and the restore command. Finally, you will learn about RAID: what RAID is, the different RAID levels, and the differences between hardware and software RAID.