Data Backup Solutions Woodland

A quick guide to data backup solutions in Woodland

In the modern world, finding the right data backup solution for your needs generally boils down to finding the solution which offers the right balance of robustness, speed, and cost. Getting it right delivers the protection you need at a price you can afford. Getting it wrong and you can find yourself with too little protection, or too much expense – or both. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to data backup solutions in Woodland.

Functions Of Data Backup?

1. You usually want to stick to the old 3-2-1 approach

According to the 3-2-1 approach, you want three copies of your production data, over two media with one copy being kept off-site. This is generally considered to give the best balance between having sufficient copies of your data to protect you from losing it, while still keeping costs reasonable and preventing you from being over-exposed to data security threats. Remember that backups of sensitive data need the same level of protection as production copies of sensitive data.

2. In most situations, cloud data backups are the only sensible approach

If you’re still using a data center then there may be a case for using physical storage for your local backup. Even in a data center, however, you generally want to use the cloud for your off-site backup. This not only saves you the hassle of transporting a physical device to an off-site storage location but also slashes the time you need to restore from an off-site copy of your data. If you’re already in the cloud (public or private), then it’s usually totally counterproductive to download data to a physical device only to upload it to a cloud again.

For the sake of completeness, you can usually backup sensitive data from a private cloud to a public cloud, you just need to encrypt it on your own servers first and keep it encrypted until it is either used or deleted.

3. Your RTO and RPO define your needs

RTO stands for recovery time objective and RPO stands for recovery point objective. Roughly translated they answer the questions “How quickly do I need my data to be restored and how long am I prepared to go between backups”. The better you can manage your data, the easier (and more affordable) it is to meet these objectives.

As an absolute minimum, you need to be able to separate your sensitive data from your general data. Hopefully, you are doing that anyway, as it is probably a legal requirement, but if not, now is the time to start. Then you want to identify your production data, meaning the data which you actively use as opposed to data that is lying dormant.

Ideally, you then want to go on and identify data that is lying dormant because it’s being kept for compliance purposes and separate it from data that is lying dormant purely and simply because nobody is using it. The former needs to go into an archive and the latter should be deleted. If, however, you can’t split the data, or nobody is willing to authorize the deletion of dormant data, then archive all of it until the last compliance deadline has passed (or until somebody complains about its absence), after which it should be safe to delete all of it.

Going forward, you would then practice robust data governance on all of your data. This minimizes the amount of data you need to back up at all and hence allows you to back up and restore in the shortest possible times, which improves your RTO. It also facilitates taking backups more frequently, which can improve your RPO.

Practicing good data hygiene saves time, hassle, and money in any environment. It’s especially relevant in the cloud where there is a direct link between consumption and cost. This means that the more you can finesse your data-backup process, the more money you can save.

4. Minimum RTO versus minimum cost

It would be lovely to be able to data full data backups all the time, but in the real world, this is likely to be far too expensive for the average SMB. Instead, the astute approach is to combine full data backups with incremental data backups (which back up only the data which has changed since the last data backup) and differential data backups (which back up only the data which has changed since the last full data backup).

Incremental data backups require fewer resources to perform and hence minimize your cost, but the fact that you may need to use several of them for a proper data restoration will, of course, impact your RTO. Differential backups typically capture more data and hence will cost more to perform, but you should only need to restore from one of them, which can improve your RTO.

If you’d like to speak to a reputable and experienced data backup solutions provider in Woodland please click here now to contact Aperio.IT.

Data Backup Solutions Davis