A Glossary of Key Terms in Backup & Recovery for CRM

For HR and recruiting professionals, the data held within your CRM isn’t just information; it’s the lifeblood of your talent acquisition and management efforts. Protecting this invaluable asset from loss, corruption, or unexpected outages is paramount. This glossary demystifies the essential concepts of backup and recovery, equipping you with the knowledge to safeguard your Keap and other CRM data, ensure business continuity, and maintain compliance in an increasingly data-driven world.

CRM Data Backup

CRM data backup refers to the process of creating copies of the information stored within your Customer Relationship Management system. This includes contact details, candidate profiles, interaction histories, recruitment pipeline stages, notes, tasks, and any custom fields critical to your HR and recruiting operations. The purpose of regular backups is to ensure that if the primary CRM data becomes corrupted, accidentally deleted, or inaccessible due due to a system failure, a recent copy can be used for restoration. For HR teams, this means protecting sensitive applicant information, employee records, and communication logs, preventing catastrophic data loss that could halt recruitment cycles or impact compliance.

Data Recovery

Data recovery is the specific process of retrieving and restoring lost, corrupted, or inaccessible data from a backup to its original or a new location. In the context of a CRM, this involves restoring your candidate databases, client contact lists, project management data, or recruiting activity logs to a functional state. Effective data recovery minimizes downtime and ensures the continuity of HR and recruiting processes, such as candidate outreach, interview scheduling, and offer management. A robust data recovery strategy is a critical component of any business continuity plan, enabling quick restoration of operations after an unforeseen event.

Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP)

A Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) is a documented, strategic process that outlines how an organization will respond to and recover from a major catastrophic event that impacts its IT infrastructure and data. For HR and recruiting, a DRP specifically addresses how CRM data, applicant tracking systems, and other critical HR tech platforms will be restored to operational status following incidents like cyberattacks, natural disasters, or significant system failures. It details roles, responsibilities, recovery sites, and data restoration procedures, ensuring that the impact on recruiting cycles, payroll processing, and employee communications is minimized, thereby protecting the company’s ability to attract and retain talent.

Business Continuity Plan (BCP)

A Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is a comprehensive strategy that outlines how an organization will maintain essential business functions during and after a disruptive event. Unlike a DRP, which focuses solely on IT systems, a BCP encompasses all aspects of the business, including human resources, operations, and facilities. For HR and recruiting, a BCP ensures that critical processes like candidate sourcing, onboarding, and employee support can continue even if primary systems are unavailable. It considers alternatives for communication, access to essential documents, and workaround procedures, ensuring that an organization can quickly return to normal operations without significant loss of productivity or revenue.

Incremental Backup

An incremental backup is a type of data backup that only copies the data that has changed or been created since the *last* backup, regardless of whether that last backup was a full or another incremental backup. This method is highly efficient in terms of storage space and backup time because it only captures new or modified data blocks. For HR and recruiting professionals using CRM systems like Keap, incremental backups are ideal for frequently changing data, such as daily updates to candidate statuses, new applicant submissions, or changes in client contact information. While restoration can take longer as it requires the last full backup plus all subsequent incremental backups, it ensures minimal disruption during the backup process itself.

Full Backup

A full backup is the process of creating a complete and comprehensive copy of all selected data at a specific point in time. This includes every file, record, and database entry within your CRM or HR system. While full backups consume significant storage space and can take a considerable amount of time to complete, they offer the simplest and often quickest restoration process, as all data is contained within a single backup set. For crucial HR and recruiting data, such as a complete Keap CRM database, performing regular full backups, perhaps weekly or monthly, serves as a solid foundation, ensuring a definitive restore point from which to recover in case of a major data loss event.

Differential Backup

A differential backup copies all data that has changed since the *last full backup*. Unlike incremental backups, which only copy changes since the previous backup of any type, a differential backup accumulates all changes made since the most recent full backup. This means that each subsequent differential backup grows in size until a new full backup is performed. For recovery, only the last full backup and the most recent differential backup are needed, making the restoration process faster than with incremental backups. In an HR and recruiting context, differential backups can be a good compromise between backup speed, storage efficiency, and recovery simplicity for your CRM data, offering a balance between the frequency of data changes and the need for quick restoration.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

Recovery Point Objective (RPO) defines the maximum tolerable amount of data that an organization can afford to lose from an IT service due to a major incident. It is measured in time, such as “1 hour” or “24 hours,” and directly influences the frequency of data backups. For HR and recruiting teams managing critical CRM data, a low RPO (e.g., 15 minutes) means that backups must occur very frequently to capture the most recent candidate applications, communication logs, or client updates, ensuring minimal data loss. A high RPO (e.g., 24 hours) suggests that losing up to a day’s worth of data is acceptable, which might be suitable for less frequently updated information but is generally not advisable for active recruiting pipelines.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO)

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) specifies the maximum acceptable duration of time in which a business application, system, or network can be down or unavailable after a disaster or disruption. It dictates how quickly critical services must be restored to prevent significant business impact. For HR and recruiting, a low RTO means that CRM systems, applicant tracking platforms, and communication tools must be brought back online very quickly to avoid disruption to candidate experience, recruitment cycles, or internal HR operations. An RTO of “4 hours,” for example, means the HR team expects their Keap CRM to be fully functional within four hours of a system outage, highlighting the urgency and efficiency required in the data recovery process.

Data Retention Policy

A data retention policy is an organization’s formal guideline that dictates how long specific types of data, including that within a CRM, must be kept, how they should be stored, and when they should be securely disposed of. For HR and recruiting professionals, this policy is crucial for managing sensitive candidate applications, employee records, background check information, and communication logs, ensuring compliance with legal requirements (e.g., GDPR, CCPA, EEOC regulations) and internal governance standards. A well-defined policy prevents unnecessary storage of outdated data, reduces security risks, and clarifies data lifecycle management, streamlining the process of archiving or deleting information when it’s no longer needed or legally required.

Data Integrity

Data integrity refers to the accuracy, consistency, and reliability of data over its entire lifecycle. In the context of CRM systems used by HR and recruiting, high data integrity means that the candidate profiles, client contact information, interaction histories, and pipeline statuses are complete, correct, and free from unauthorized alterations. Maintaining data integrity is vital for making sound hiring decisions, personalizing candidate communications, ensuring compliance, and generating accurate reports. Without it, duplicate records, incomplete profiles, or corrupted entries can lead to inefficiencies, errors in outreach, and potentially costly compliance violations, undermining the entire recruitment process.

Data Redundancy

Data redundancy is the practice of storing the same piece of data in multiple locations within an IT system or across different systems to protect it against loss or corruption. For HR and recruiting using CRM systems, implementing data redundancy means that critical candidate and client data is duplicated, ensuring that if one copy becomes unavailable, another readily accessible copy exists. This can involve mirroring data across different servers, utilizing cloud-based backup solutions with distributed storage, or maintaining multiple backup types. Redundancy significantly enhances data availability and fault tolerance, providing an essential layer of protection against system failures or accidental deletions, thus safeguarding the continuity of recruiting operations.

Cloud Backup

Cloud backup is a strategy where an organization’s data, including its CRM content, is backed up and stored on remote servers managed by a third-party provider, accessible via the internet. Instead of storing backups on local hard drives or tapes, data is securely transmitted and held in the cloud. For HR and recruiting teams, cloud backup offers several significant advantages: offsite storage protects against local disasters, scalability to accommodate growing data volumes, and ease of access from anywhere, supporting remote work models. It simplifies disaster recovery by providing readily available restoration points without the need for physical infrastructure, ensuring that candidate databases and client information are always protected and recoverable.

Encryption (in backup)

Encryption in backup is the process of converting sensitive data into a coded format during the backup process, making it unreadable to anyone without the proper decryption key. This is a critical security measure for HR and recruiting professionals, especially when handling highly sensitive personal identifiable information (PII) of candidates and employees within CRM systems. Encrypting backup data protects it from unauthorized access, theft, or breaches, whether the data is stored on premises, in transit, or in the cloud. It is essential for maintaining compliance with data protection regulations like GDPR and HIPAA, providing peace of mind that confidential HR data remains secure throughout its lifecycle, including during storage and recovery.

Rollback

A rollback is the process of restoring a database, system, or specific data set to a previous, known-good state. This action is typically performed when recent changes, updates, or operations have introduced errors, corrupted data, or caused system instability. In the context of a CRM used by HR and recruiting, a rollback could be executed if a mass data import went wrong, an automation workflow inadvertently deleted or altered critical candidate records, or a system upgrade caused unexpected issues. By reverting to an earlier backup or snapshot, the organization can undo problematic changes, restoring the integrity of their talent pipeline or client database and ensuring uninterrupted operations without losing essential historical data that predates the issue.

If you would like to read more, we recommend this article: Unbreakable Keap Data: Mastering Incremental Backups for HR & Recruiting