What is the main purpose of a backup?

The main purpose of a backup is to protect against data loss. Backups are essential for preserving copies of important data, allowing for recovery in the event of hardware failure, accidental deletion, cyber-attacks, or natural disasters. By maintaining regular backups, organizations and individuals can ensure that they have access to critical information and can restore it to its original state when necessary.

While creating restore points for software may involve aspects of backup, the primary function is to safeguard comprehensive data that extends beyond merely system restore points. Enhancing data accessibility can be a secondary benefit of having backed-up data available but does not capture the primary objective of backups. Additionally, increasing system speed is not relevant to the concept of backups, as they are focused on data preservation rather than performance enhancement. Thus, the focus on data loss protection aligns directly with the fundamental principle of what backups are fundamentally designed to achieve.