Backup Solutions Top Ten Questions and Several Options

There is no shortage of Backup Solution options available today, although a number of standard best practices have emerged throughout the years.

If you are a home user backing up to an Internet service, these questions are not critical. If however, you are backing up hundreds of Terabytes, you should probably consider the questions below as they are good things to keep in mind:

1. How much data do you need to backup?
2. What kind of data are you backing up? (simple files like word processing files and spreadsheets, or complex multimedia files that include image, audio and video files)
3. What is the daily change rate of your information? (5% daily? 10%?, 20%?, more?)
4. How rapidly does your data grow? (Recent industry estimates range from 30% to 70% growth, year over year).
5. How long do you have to retain the information that you backup?
6. How many copies of the data do you need to retain and for how long (are their legal / regulatory reasons that you have to keep several copies of the data?).
7. How “current” does the data backed up need to be? Does the rate of change drive hourly backups? Daily backups? Weekly backups?
8. Would you expect a full backup every time a backup took place, or would you expect a full backup weekly, with just what changed to be backed up nightly, for example (incremental backups).
9. How long would be an acceptable time to recover the data backed up? For example, if you made a full backup on Sunday, and it took till Wednesday of the following week to recover your data, would that be acceptable? That would be at least a 72 hour recovery window, and your data would be at least 72 business hours old.
10. If you needed to, how long would it take to obtain another computer or server to recover the backup to? (In the event that the main computer or server was not available). Whatever time is needed to put in place another PC or server, needs to be added to the recovery time overall, elongating the recovery process.

The following types of backup solutions are available options for individuals or small companies:

Disk to Tape Based Backup: Computers attached directly to local tape drives, where data is copied to. Easy to remove tapes from site for safe keeping, though cost per MB may be high and recovery time is slow for random files. Not always efficient if backing up small amounts of data or single files. Limitations on tape size may be problematic. Tape storage and cataloging is not always easy, and tape costs are often more than expected over the lifetime of the backup retention time.

Disk to Disk Based Backup: Computers attached to a network, or local USB type hard drive, where backup software can select the additional hard drive as the target for backup data. Easy, fast and reliable way to move large amounts of data backed up among stand alone computers or network servers and PCs. It is usually faster to perform backups to disk rather than tape. It is almost always faster to restore from Disk, unless just restoring sequential files. Easy to backup and restore single files and cost per MB stored and retained is compelling over the lifetime of the stored data.

Disk to Disk to Tape Based Backup: This is the same as Disk to Disk, with the exception that due to regulatory reasons, it may be a requirement that the user have a copy of the data stored on Tape. In this case, the backup from disk to disk is fast and the subsequent disk to tape copy can be done at any time and does not interfere with the regular use of the computer system with which the data was copied from.

Disk to Disk to Remote Disk Based Backup: This is the same as Disk to Disk, with an additional safeguard of transmitting a copy of the data to a remote site onto another disk for safekeeping in the event of a local disaster. This can be easily done today either using a company network connection from one site to another, or by way of a local backup, being sent to an off-site backup service provider.

Internet Based Backup Solution: This solution is gaining more ground everyday with individuals and small to medium size business owners. Several companies offer the service and it is one of the easiest to use. It effectively outsources your backup process to the Internet Based Service Provider, and the data to be backed up travels across the Internet connection (encrypted) to the remote site, where your data is stored on the third party storage systems.

No matter what your requirements are, there is a company with Backup Solutions that will work for you. Many products can take care of backing up your PCs' or Servers for your data and databases locally or across the Internet. The main thing is to backup the data and make sure you can restore it when you need to. In the last couple of years, data deduplication technologies have also really been catching on, and their benefits are enormous. They can save hours and days of time and space on your storage arrays, saving you money from many perspectives. Data deduplication can also work along with other technologies.