The Importance of Data Backup

At the end of the day, the reality is that if you value your business and its continuity, then getting serious about data backups can’t come too soon.

And it’s not just for the good of the business that backups need to be taken seriously. In terms of legal requirements and depending on what vertical a company operates in, doing data backups may well be required by laws and international conventions (such as Sarbannes-Oxley), not just common sense.

Considering Options

Magnetic tape is the most commonly used medium for bulk data storage, backup, archiving, and interchange. Tape has typically had a better capacity/price ratio compared with hard disk, but recently the ratios have become a lot closer. As a sequential access medium, the access times of tape may be poor, but the rate of continuously writing or reading data can be very fast.

However, the majority of IT managers and business owners agree that tape does not work. Ironically, most organisations are still using fixed-schedule antiquated tape systems that are subject to human error, cumbersome to manage, and are notoriously unreliable. Statistics from Enterprise Strategy Group and Rowan Revivio Software show that some 30 percent of IT costs are associated with backup; 20 percent of nightly tape-based backup jobs fail; and 40 percent of dedicated, full-time IT managers can’t recover data from their tape backups.

The SonicWALL CDP (Continuous Data Protection) series provides a disk-based backup and recovery solution that meets the needs of organisations and remote offices. These business continuity appliances provide real-time, hassle-free, local backup, as well as hands-free offsite protection for servers, laptops, and PCs. This reliable backup solution integrates a host of other features in one centrally managed appliance to make it easier for IT managers and business owners to protect their organisation’s most important asset—their data. And, since SonicWALL CDP only backs up block level differences within each file, the performance of the network is not impacted or compromised.

Hard disk storage is also an option. The main advantages of hard disk storage are low access times, availability, capacity, and ease of use. Some disk-based backup systems, such as Virtual Tape Libraries, support data de-duplication which can dramatically reduce the amount of disk storage capacity consumed by daily and weekly backup data.

Optical disk storage (CD/DVD) is also popular. The main advantages of CDs are that they can hold up to 700 MB of data and can also be restored on any machine with a CD-ROM drive. Another common format is recordable DVD, which has a capacity of 4.7 GB. Many optical disk formats are useful for archival purposes since the data can't be changed.

Solid state storage devices—also known as flash memory, thumb drives, USB keys, compact flash, smart media, memory stick, etc—are relatively costly for their low capacity, but offer portability, ease of use, and are to some extent even disposable.

Remote backup service, via the internet to a remote location, can protect against some worse case scenarios, such as fire, flood or earthquake. The main drawback for a remote backup service is that the internet connection is usually substantially slower than the speed of local data storage devices, so this can be a problem for people with large amounts of data and little time.

There are many software options available, too. The Acronis True Image 9.1 Workstation is designed for backup and to restore an office network or a local computer. This software gives users many opportunities, like backup to a virtual server or FTP, managing backup/restore tasks remotely on other computers and more.

After a system crash, the Acronis True Image 9.1 Workstation allows users to perform a full system restore, a bare-metal restore, or just a restore of individual files and folders in minutes. Complete system restoration can be performed to an existing system, to a new system with different hardware, or to a virtual machine.

Highlighted features include remote deployment, backup and restore of any computer in the corporate network, Acronis Universal Restore, Acronis Snap Restore, and save backups directly to DVDs without using third-party DVD burning software.