From individual PC to mainframe environments, there are a broad range of backup options and technologies available. Many of these options are leveraged for both performance and capacity with hardware- or software-driven data compression processes.

Archival Retention backups are intended for long-term protection of data which may be required at some time in the future for legal, regulatory, tax or business reasons. Source program code for production systems, contracts, financial data used for tax preparation purposes, customer orders, confirmation of deliveries are all examples of data which may be archived.

Disaster Recovery backups are intended solely for recovery from a substantial disruption, ranging from loss of a single disk volume to an entire data center. Synchronization of all necessary backup volumes or files is often a concern, since it is not always feasible to back up an entire system (or group of systems) at one time.