What is the main purpose of data mirroring?

The main purpose of data mirroring is to ensure data redundancy across multiple drives. In this process, an exact copy of data is maintained on a second drive or across multiple drives, ensuring that if one drive fails or becomes compromised, the data remains available and intact on the other drive(s). This redundancy helps to provide a level of protection against data loss, enhancing the overall reliability and availability of information.

Data mirroring is particularly important in environments where data integrity and uptime are critical, such as in database management or mission-critical applications. By maintaining a real-time duplicate of data, organizations can quickly recover from hardware failures without significant downtime.

While creating a copy of a hard drive may seem similar, true data mirroring involves continuous updates and synchronizations between drives to ensure that they reflect the latest changes. Capturing changes in data after a full backup pertains to incremental backups rather than raw mirroring, and storing data securely off-site is part of a broader data backup strategy, which aims to protect against physical disasters but doesn't specifically refer to the practice of data mirroring itself.