A Glossary of Core Backup & Recovery Terminology for HR & Recruiting Professionals
In the fast-paced world of HR and recruiting, data is paramount. From sensitive candidate information to critical employee records and compliance documents, ensuring the integrity and availability of your data is not just good practice—it’s a business imperative. Understanding key terminology around data backup and recovery is essential for HR and recruiting leaders looking to safeguard their systems, maintain business continuity, and protect against data loss. This glossary clarifies fundamental concepts, helping you make informed decisions about your organization’s data resilience strategy, especially when integrating with CRM systems like Keap or leveraging automation platforms.
Data Backup
Data backup refers to the process of creating copies of data so that these copies can be used to restore the original data after a data loss event. For HR professionals, this means regularly copying databases containing applicant tracking system (ATS) data, employee records, payroll information, and compliance documents. An effective backup strategy protects against accidental deletion, system failures, cyberattacks, and natural disasters. In an automated recruiting context, ensuring your CRM (e.g., Keap) is regularly backed up is crucial, as automation workflows often depend on the integrity and availability of this core data. Without robust backups, a single data loss incident could derail recruitment campaigns, impact onboarding processes, and lead to significant operational disruptions.
Data Recovery
Data recovery is the process of retrieving lost, deleted, corrupted, or inaccessible data from a primary storage source or a backup. When a system failure or data corruption occurs, the ability to quickly and effectively restore data to its last known good state is critical for HR and recruiting operations. This involves using backup copies to bring systems and data back online, minimizing downtime and operational impact. For HR teams, swift data recovery can mean the difference between a minor blip and a major crisis when it comes to accessing candidate profiles, processing job applications, or verifying employee credentials. Automation often integrates multiple data sources; hence, a comprehensive data recovery plan ensures all connected systems can be restored synchronously.
Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) defines the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time. For example, an RPO of one hour means that in the event of a disaster, you can afford to lose no more than one hour’s worth of data. For HR and recruiting, determining the RPO involves assessing the criticality of different data types. Highly dynamic data, such as real-time applicant submissions or active interview schedules, might require a very low RPO (e.g., minutes), while static archival data could have a higher RPO (e.g., 24 hours). This objective directly influences the frequency of your data backups; a lower RPO demands more frequent backups, which is crucial when your recruiting operations rely on continuous data input and rapid decision-making.
Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) specifies the maximum acceptable duration of time that a system or application can be down following a disaster or outage before it starts to cause unacceptable damage to the business. For HR departments, a low RTO is vital for systems like ATS or payroll, where prolonged downtime can halt hiring processes, delay critical payments, or disrupt employee onboarding. A high RTO might be acceptable for less critical, intermittent systems. Establishing a clear RTO guides the selection of recovery strategies and technologies, ensuring that HR and recruiting functions can resume operations within an acceptable timeframe, thereby minimizing financial losses and reputational damage linked to service interruptions.
Disaster Recovery (DR)
Disaster Recovery (DR) refers to a set of policies, tools, and procedures that enable the recovery or continuation of vital technology infrastructure and systems following a natural or human-induced disaster. A DR plan is comprehensive, covering everything from data backups to alternative operational sites. For HR and recruiting, a DR plan ensures that essential functions like applicant tracking, HRIS access, and communication systems can be quickly restored or maintained, even if primary systems are incapacitated. This is particularly important for remote or distributed HR teams, where access to centralized data is continuous. Integrating DR into your HR tech strategy, perhaps through cloud-based solutions, helps safeguard your ability to recruit, hire, and manage employees regardless of unforeseen disruptions.
Business Continuity (BC)
Business Continuity (BC) is a broader concept than Disaster Recovery, encompassing a comprehensive plan for maintaining critical business functions, not just IT systems, during and after a disruption. While DR focuses on IT recovery, BC addresses the overall resilience of the organization. For HR and recruiting, a BC plan might include strategies for communicating with employees during an emergency, continuing payroll operations manually if systems are down, or implementing alternative candidate sourcing methods. It ensures that even in the face of significant challenges, the essential functions of talent acquisition and employee management can persist, thereby protecting the workforce, candidates, and the organization’s ability to operate effectively.
Full Backup
A full backup is a complete copy of all selected data at a specific point in time. While simple and providing the fastest recovery time, full backups consume significant storage space and can be time-consuming to perform, especially for large HR databases. For critical Keap CRM data or a comprehensive HRIS, a weekly or daily full backup might be supplemented by more frequent partial backups to balance recovery speed with operational efficiency. A full backup acts as the baseline, ensuring that a complete snapshot of all HR and recruiting data, from applicant resumes to compensation details, is available for restoration, providing the highest level of data integrity for a given point in time.
Incremental Backup
An incremental backup only copies data that has changed since the last backup (of any type—full or incremental). This method is highly efficient in terms of storage space and backup time. For HR and recruiting, where data changes frequently (e.g., new applications, updated employee records, interview notes), incremental backups are ideal for capturing these constant updates without overburdening system resources. For example, if your Keap CRM is backed up daily, an incremental backup would only copy new candidate profiles or changes to existing records made since the previous day’s backup. While faster to create, restoring from incremental backups can be slower, as it requires restoring the last full backup plus all subsequent incremental backups in sequence.
Differential Backup
A differential backup copies all data that has changed since the last *full* backup. Unlike incremental backups, each differential backup only needs the previous full backup for restoration, making the recovery process quicker than with incremental backups. For HR and recruiting, this provides a good balance between storage efficiency and recovery speed. If your HRIS undergoes significant daily changes but you only perform a full backup weekly, daily differential backups can efficiently capture all changes made throughout the week. When a restore is needed, you simply retrieve the last full backup and the most recent differential backup, streamlining the process for critical systems like applicant tracking or employee benefits administration.
Cloud Backup
Cloud backup involves storing copies of your data on remote servers managed by a third-party provider, accessed over the internet. This offers significant advantages for HR and recruiting, including scalability, reduced on-premise infrastructure costs, and enhanced data accessibility from anywhere. Cloud solutions inherently provide off-site storage, protecting data from local disasters. For HR teams managing sensitive data in Keap or other CRMs, cloud backup ensures that even if your office servers are compromised, your data remains secure and recoverable. It also facilitates automation strategies by ensuring data is always available to cloud-based integration platforms, enhancing the resilience and flexibility of your HR tech stack.
On-Premise Backup
On-premise backup involves storing data copies locally within your organization’s physical premises, typically on servers, external hard drives, or tape drives. While offering direct control over data and potentially faster local recovery speeds, it requires significant upfront investment in hardware, ongoing maintenance, and physical security. For HR departments, an on-premise strategy can be suitable for highly sensitive data that cannot, for compliance or policy reasons, be stored externally. However, it is vulnerable to local disasters (fire, flood, theft) and requires robust off-site replication to truly protect against catastrophic data loss. Many organizations now adopt a hybrid approach, combining the speed of on-premise with the resilience of cloud solutions.
Data Integrity
Data integrity refers to the overall completeness, accuracy, and consistency of data throughout its lifecycle. For HR and recruiting, maintaining data integrity is paramount, as errors in employee records, candidate applications, or payroll data can lead to compliance issues, incorrect hiring decisions, and significant operational costs. Backup and recovery processes play a critical role in data integrity by ensuring that restored data is an accurate and uncorrupted reflection of its original state. Implementing robust verification processes after backups and before restorations, especially for automated data transfers into systems like Keap, is essential to confirm that data remains reliable and trustworthy for all HR and recruiting functions.
Encryption
Encryption is the process of converting information or data into a code to prevent unauthorized access. In the context of data backup, encryption protects sensitive HR and recruiting data (e.g., PII, compensation details, background check results) both during transit to backup storage and while at rest in the backup location. Compliance regulations (like GDPR, CCPA) often mandate encryption for personal data. For HR professionals, ensuring that all backups—whether on-premise or in the cloud—are encrypted is a non-negotiable security measure. This safeguarding prevents unauthorized individuals from accessing confidential applicant or employee information, even if they gain access to the backup media, thus maintaining trust and avoiding severe legal and reputational consequences.
Redundancy
Redundancy in data backup and recovery refers to the practice of duplicating critical components or information to ensure that if one component fails, there is a backup available to take its place. This can apply to data storage (e.g., storing backups in multiple locations or on multiple devices), network paths, or even entire server infrastructures. For HR and recruiting, building redundancy into your data systems means that the loss of a single server, network connection, or backup drive will not disrupt access to vital information like applicant pipelines or employee performance reviews. Implementing redundancy, perhaps through geo-replicated cloud backups or redundant on-premise storage arrays, significantly enhances the availability and fault tolerance of your data, ensuring uninterrupted operations.
Data Retention Policy
A data retention policy is an organization’s established protocol for keeping information for operational or legal reasons and then disposing of it. For HR and recruiting, this policy dictates how long candidate applications, employee records, payroll data, and other sensitive information must be stored, considering legal requirements (e.g., EEOC, ERISA) and internal business needs. Backup strategies must align with these policies to ensure that data is retained for the correct duration—not too short (leading to non-compliance) and not too long (creating unnecessary storage costs and potential privacy liabilities). Regularly reviewing and automating aspects of your data retention policy within your backup routines, especially for CRM data in systems like Keap, helps ensure compliance and efficient data management.
If you would like to read more, we recommend this article: Verified Keap CRM Backups: The Foundation for HR & Recruiting Data Integrity
