The recovery process is much more important than the backup process. It is based on the appropriate recovery-point objectives (RPOs) and recovery-time objectives (RTOs). The process usually drives a decision to have a combination of technologies in place, from online local replicas, to backup to disk, to backup to tape for long-term, passive RPOs.
Archive processes are determined not only by the required retention times, but also by retrieval-time service levels and the availability requirements of the information in the archive.
For both processes, a combination of hardware and software is needed to deliver the appropriate service level. The best way to discover the appropriate service level is to classify the data and align the business applications with it.
Understand the environment
Actively archive valuable information to tiered storage
Back up active production information to disk
Retrieve from archive or recover from backup