With dramatic increases in data expansion and a growing dependence on information for business continuity, companies will need to know that their information is stored safely and can be retrieved quickly with the minimum of space for the most benefit.
Keeping pace with the information explosion is not straightforward. With around 50% growth year on year and increasingly complex IT environments, many backup systems are struggling to cope. At exactly the exact same time, achieving high levels of redundancy can be costly and employers risk paying a premium for high-spec solutions that far outperform their demands.
Every client is different, both in terms of budget and architecture. So everything has to be considered from easy off the shelf tools to solutions which are custom fit to your systems using a continuous focus on increasing capacity and reducing costs.
Backup vs Redundancy vs archiving
The tech overlap between backup, redundancy and archiving can often lead to confusion, but each has a different role to play in streamlining and protecting data. Backups essentially create another copy of data at particular points in time, ideally maintaining multiple historical copies. Redundancy establishes a direct copy of a whole system, ready to take over if the original system fails. Backup provides a certain degree of redundancy, and redundancy a fundamental level of backup, but are standalone solutions.
Archiving creates a primary copy of selected data with the aim of retaining data in the long term. Not all the data found in a backup will finally wind up in an archive so archiving is rarely a decent backup solution in itself but as a complementary strategy, it can substantially optimize the data storage procedure.
Most backup strategies rely on a combination of cloud backup solutions, redundancy and archiving. An important element to keep in mind when planning a backup schedule is prioritization of information. Not all information is created equal and a tiered backup strategy that restores the most critical software first will get you back in business faster and cut information storage costs.
Backup Types
Complete – A full backup copies each file in a system. Restore times are Speedy but copies are time-consuming and space-intensive so scheduling and data prioritization are significant considerations.
Differential and Incremental – Differential and incremental backups fill in the gaps between full backups, storing any changes to information. They require a portion of the host CPU cycles, bandwidth and storage space. The risk of information loss is obviously greater than full backups and restore times are slower but Blueberry can use specific snapshot technology like Amazon EBS to reconstruct images more rapidly.
Artificial – A synthetic backup consolidates a Complete backup and subsequent Incremental backups into one file. Recovery is fast, using less server cycles and bandwidth.
