 What is the value of your data? This is a question all business owners should ask themselves seriously. Most companies see their backup as a hassle rather than the savior it is. The fact is that more and more companies have integrated technology into their infrastructure without upgrading their backup solutions. With document imaging and high end graphics becoming more predominate and storage cost decreasing, most companies have lost control of their data and forget the true value until something is lost.
Questions to ask yourself
1. What is the impact if all my data is lost and it cannot be recovered?
2. What is the impact if all my data from last year is lost and it cannot be recovered?
3. What is the impact if all my data from last month is lost and it cannot be recovered?
4. What is the impact if all my data from yesterday is lost and it cannot be recovered?
5. What is the impact if all my data from today is lost and it cannot be recovered?
These questions are not to scare you, but help you make an informed decision. Your answers will help you decide which backup solution is right for you. Please answer these questions honestly and try to put a dollar value to them in lost time and revenue. If you answered no impact for all the questions, you must not use a computer in your business. If you answered number one with anything other than no, then you need a backup solution. Now that you know you need a backup solution, which one is right for my company.
 Common Backup Methods
Most companies utilize the traditional backup to tape. This consists of a tape drive and backup software. This method basically makes a complete copy of the server nightly to tape to take offsite. The benefits of this method are that it is easy to understand and widely accepted as an industry standard. The issues with tape backup are speed and reliability. Traditional tape backup has to open every file and copy it. This requires time and causes significant performance issues. Tape also requires user intervention to change the tape and this as we all know does not happen all the time. This is where the issue of reliability is noticed. If a tape is not inserted, the backup does not run overnight. When a tape is inserted the next day, the backup job will run and slow your network and cause you headaches.
More companies are now turning to disk to tape backups. This backup consists of the tape drive and backup software that the tradition backup to tape utilizes, but takes advantage cheap high speed storage device to improve speed and reliability. Backups are now done to the disk first, so that user intervention and tape drive speed are not an issues. The backups run nightly whether or not there is a tape in the tape drive. Once the backup is completed to disk, it is then replicated to tape to be taken offsite. This allows for backups to be replicated during the day without sacrificing network performance.
Then next generation of backups has only recently emerged and is beginning to gain traction. These backups do not rely on tape at all. They use special software to create moment in time snapshots of your data and copy them to a cheap high speed storage device. The special software creates one full backup of all the data and then creates small incremental backups every fifteen minutes or period that you desire. This allows the backup process to be more efficient in time and space. Backups take less space and time because they are only backing up the changes and not the entire system. This allows you to do something the traditional tape backups have never been able to do. That is backup data in near real-time. This means that data that is created and deleted in the same day is not lost. Another benefit is that these backups are kept forever, meaning that there is no retention period where the data will be over written. Once the data is backed up, you can recover it from that date on. If I started my first image backup last July, I can recover a file from the day it started, not just the last two weeks or two months, depending on your tape rotation.
Now you are asking yourself, what about offsite data storage for disaster recovery? This can be done by two different methods. One requires user intervention, the other does not.  The first method is similar to tape, but uses hot swap mirrored disk drives to store the data to be taken offsite. One drive will stay onsite at all times and the mirrored copy will be rotated offsite for disaster recovery. The advantage to this solution is cost. The disadvantage is that it is not hand free. Some will be responsible for taken the disks offsite similar to the traditional tape. The second option is remote offsite backup. This method copies the backup images securely over the internet to an offsite location. The benefit is that there is no user intervention. With this benefit comes cost. Cost can be significant when you are backing up hundreds of gigs of data. This can require high monthly offsite storage fees and also a possible increase in bandwidth needs form your ISP. Conclusion All of these solutions have their place in the market. The question is which is right for you? |
