A Glossary of Key Terms in Backup Technologies & Architectures

In today’s data-driven world, where HR and recruiting operations rely heavily on intricate digital systems like applicant tracking systems (ATS), CRM platforms like Keap, and various HRIS tools, understanding backup technologies is no longer just an IT concern. For HR and recruiting professionals, robust data backup and recovery strategies are critical for maintaining compliance, ensuring business continuity, protecting sensitive employee and candidate data, and safeguarding operational efficiency. This glossary demystifies key terms related to data backup and architecture, providing you with the essential knowledge to navigate conversations around data security, automation, and resilience.

Data Backup

Data backup refers to the process of creating copies of data that can be recovered in the event of data loss, corruption, or system failure. For HR and recruiting, this means regularly duplicating crucial information such as candidate profiles, employee records, payroll data, performance reviews, and compliance documents. Effective backup strategies are foundational to data integrity, allowing organizations to restore information quickly and accurately, thereby minimizing downtime and mitigating the risk of non-compliance with data protection regulations. In an automated recruiting workflow, a robust backup ensures that if a system glitch or human error impacts candidate data in your ATS or CRM, you have a recent, clean copy to restore, preventing lost leads or compliance issues.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

RPO defines the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time. For instance, an RPO of one hour means that if a system failure occurs, you can afford to lose up to one hour of data. In the context of HR and recruiting, determining RPO involves evaluating how much data you can afford to lose for critical systems like an applicant tracking system or an employee database. A lower RPO typically requires more frequent backups, which can be crucial for fast-moving recruitment cycles where every new candidate application or interview note is vital. Setting appropriate RPOs helps define the frequency of your automated backup routines, directly impacting how much data loss your HR team might experience during an unforeseen event.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO)

RTO specifies the maximum tolerable duration of time it takes to restore a business process to an operational state after an incident. While RPO focuses on how much data can be lost, RTO focuses on how quickly operations can resume. For HR and recruiting teams, a low RTO means critical systems—such as those managing candidate applications, onboarding workflows, or payroll processing—must be brought back online swiftly to avoid significant disruption. A lengthy RTO could lead to missed hiring targets, delayed employee onboarding, or compliance penalties. Integrating RTO considerations into your automation strategy ensures that recovery procedures are not only effective but also time-efficient, minimizing the impact on your talent acquisition and management efforts.

Disaster Recovery (DR)

Disaster Recovery (DR) is a comprehensive plan for how an organization will resume critical operations after a major disruption, such as a cyberattack, natural disaster, or large-scale system failure. It encompasses the policies, tools, and procedures needed to recover and restore an organization’s IT infrastructure and data. For HR and recruiting, a well-defined DR plan ensures continuity for essential functions like talent acquisition, payroll, and employee support. This includes having off-site data backups, redundant systems, and clear communication protocols. In an automated HR environment, DR planning often involves replicating entire automation workflows and associated data to a secondary site, ensuring that even complex recruitment funnels or onboarding sequences can be quickly restored.

Business Continuity Planning (BCP)

Business Continuity Planning (BCP) is a proactive process that identifies potential threats to an organization and outlines strategies to maintain essential business functions during and after a disaster. BCP is broader than DR, as it considers all aspects of a business, not just IT. For HR and recruiting, BCP addresses how teams will continue to operate—processing applications, conducting interviews, managing employee inquiries, and running payroll—even if offices are inaccessible or primary systems are down. This might involve remote work strategies, manual workarounds, and alternate communication channels. When integrating automation, BCP ensures that the critical workflows and data dependencies are understood and have contingency plans, preventing a single point of failure from crippling vital HR operations.

Cloud Backup

Cloud backup is a method of backing up data to an off-site cloud-based server managed by a third-party provider. Instead of storing backups on physical disks or tape drives on-premises, data is securely transmitted over the internet to a remote data center. This approach offers significant advantages for HR and recruiting professionals, including enhanced data security through encryption, scalability to accommodate growing data volumes, and simplified disaster recovery. Cloud backups eliminate the need for costly on-site infrastructure and manual management, allowing HR teams to automate their data protection with confidence. For sensitive employee and candidate data, cloud backup provides geographic redundancy and accessibility from anywhere, supporting remote teams and distributed operations while adhering to compliance requirements.

On-Premise Backup

On-premise backup refers to storing copies of data on physical storage devices located within the organization’s own facilities, such as external hard drives, network-attached storage (NAS), or tape drives. This traditional method offers direct control over data and potentially faster recovery times for smaller incidents, as data doesn’t need to be downloaded from the internet. However, it requires significant upfront investment in hardware, ongoing maintenance, and physical security measures. For HR and recruiting, on-premise backups can be a component of a hybrid strategy, especially for highly sensitive or frequently accessed data. While it provides immediate access, it is vulnerable to local disasters (fire, flood) and requires manual oversight, which can be resource-intensive compared to automated cloud solutions.

Hybrid Backup

Hybrid backup combines elements of both on-premise and cloud backup strategies. In this model, data is backed up locally (on-premise) for quick recovery of frequently accessed files and simultaneously replicated to a cloud environment for off-site disaster recovery and long-term retention. For HR and recruiting, a hybrid approach offers a robust, multi-layered defense against data loss. For example, a recruiting firm might back up daily candidate applications to an on-site NAS for rapid access, while simultaneously sending weekly or monthly full backups of their entire Keap CRM database to a secure cloud service. This strategy optimizes for both speed of recovery and comprehensive protection, balancing cost, performance, and security needs for critical HR data assets.

Data Archiving

Data archiving involves moving inactive or less frequently accessed data from primary storage to a separate, long-term storage system. Unlike backups, which are temporary copies for recovery, archives are permanent records kept for compliance, historical analysis, or legal purposes, often for extended periods. For HR and recruiting, archiving is crucial for managing former employee records, old candidate applications, and compliance documentation that must be retained for specific durations (e.g., EEOC, GDPR). An effective archiving strategy, often automated, ensures that valuable historical data is preserved cost-effectively without burdening live systems, while also allowing for its retrieval if ever needed for audits or legal inquiries.

Immutable Backups

Immutable backups are data copies that, once created, cannot be altered, overwritten, or deleted for a specified period. This “write once, read many” approach provides an incredibly strong defense against ransomware attacks, accidental deletions, and insider threats, as the original data remains untouched. For HR and recruiting, where sensitive personal identifiable information (PII) is routinely handled, immutable backups offer an unparalleled layer of security and compliance assurance. Should an attacker encrypt your live systems, knowing that an uncompromised, unchangeable copy of your employee or candidate data exists drastically reduces recovery time and potential data breach costs, ensuring that your automated data protection strategy has an unassailable last line of defense.

Data Redundancy

Data redundancy refers to the practice of duplicating data in multiple locations or on multiple storage devices to protect against data loss. The goal is to ensure that if one copy of the data becomes unavailable or corrupted, another identical copy is readily accessible. For HR and recruiting professionals, data redundancy is vital for high-availability systems like an ATS or CRM, where continuous access to candidate and employee data is non-negotiable. This can involve storing data on multiple hard drives (RAID configurations), replicating databases across different servers, or distributing data across various cloud regions. Implementing data redundancy helps minimize service interruptions, supporting uninterrupted automated workflows and ensuring consistent access to critical information.

Encryption (in Backup)

Encryption in backup refers to the process of converting data into a coded format to prevent unauthorized access, both during transmission and while stored. This is a critical security measure for HR and recruiting data, which often contains highly sensitive personal information such as social security numbers, birthdates, salary details, and medical information. Encrypting backups ensures that even if backup files are compromised or fall into the wrong hands, the data remains unreadable and secure. Compliance regulations like GDPR and HIPAA often mandate encryption for sensitive data. Integrating encryption into automated backup workflows is paramount for protecting privacy, maintaining trust, and avoiding severe penalties for data breaches.

Data Governance

Data governance is a comprehensive framework of policies, processes, and roles that defines how an organization manages its data assets, ensuring data quality, usability, integrity, and security. For HR and recruiting, robust data governance is essential for managing candidate and employee lifecycles, from initial application to offboarding. It dictates who can access what data, how long data is retained, how it’s backed up, and how it complies with legal and ethical standards (e.g., “right to be forgotten” under GDPR). When applied to automated HR systems, data governance ensures that automation workflows are designed with compliance and ethical data handling in mind, preventing the automation of bad practices and ensuring that sensitive data is managed responsibly throughout its entire lifecycle.

Deduplication

Deduplication is a specialized data compression technique that eliminates redundant copies of repeating data. Instead of storing multiple identical copies of a file or data block, deduplication stores only one unique instance and replaces subsequent copies with pointers to that original. This significantly reduces the amount of storage space required for backups and improves backup and recovery efficiency. For HR and recruiting, where large volumes of similar documents (e.g., resumes, application forms) and frequently updated database records are common, deduplication can dramatically cut storage costs and speed up data transfer times for cloud backups. This optimization is crucial for managing the ever-growing repositories of talent data without incurring excessive infrastructure expenses.

Incremental Backup

An incremental backup is a type of backup that only copies data that has changed or been added since the *last* backup (of any type—full, differential, or another incremental). This method is highly efficient in terms of storage space and backup time because it only captures the delta, or the new modifications. For HR and recruiting, where applicant tracking systems or employee databases may see frequent, small changes, incremental backups are ideal for very frequent backup schedules (e.g., hourly or every few hours) without consuming excessive network bandwidth or storage. While fast to create, restoring from incremental backups can be more complex, requiring the full backup plus all subsequent incremental backups to reconstruct the data.

If you would like to read more, we recommend this article: Verified Keap CRM Backups: The Foundation for HR & Recruiting Data Integrity