Data Backup Storage Roseville

Definition Of Data Backup Storage Services

Modern businesses are only as good as their infrastructure. In the case of IT infrastructure, its entire purpose is essentially to safeguard data. A large part of safeguarding data is ensuring that it is appropriately backed up. A large part of ensuring that data is appropriately backed up is choosing the right data backup storage. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to what you need to know about data backup storage in Roseville.

Requirements For Data Backup Storage

1. You need twice the amount of data backup storage as you do production storage

The accepted rule for data backups is that you need to have one local data backup and one off-site data backup. This means that you need to budget for twice as much data backup storage as you do production storage. In reality, you’ll probably get away with a little less as you should be able to use compression on your data backups. It is, however, better to budget for a bit more to be on the safe side.

2. Backing up data to physical hardware generally only makes sense for local data center backups

If you are using the cloud as your main (or only) working environment, then your local data backup will be taken to your regular cloud and it is usually sensible to use a second cloud as your data backup storage location. Specifically, you usually want to use a public cloud as a data backup storage location as it is massively more economical than running a (second) private cloud on a full-time basis. You can usually store sensitive data in a public cloud, although you may need to keep it encrypted.

If, however, you are working in a data center, then you will be taking your local data backup to physical storage (and possibly your off-site data backup as well). This means you need to think carefully about your choice of data backup storage medium.

Tapes are a tried-and-trusted solution. In fact, for many years, they were effectively the only viable solution. This means that there are a lot of companies out there that invested in the necessary infrastructure a long time ago and many of these companies are still quite happy to stick with tapes for the time being. Tapes have the benefit of being economical (over the long term) and robust. It’s just unfortunate that they are slow and unsearchable. This is why they are essentially fading out of favor.

This leaves hard drives and, perhaps, SSDs, although SSDs are probably still too expensive to be used as an SMB’s main solution. They are, however, coming down in price and may become a viable option in the fairly near future.

Hard drives and SSDs have similar qualities, although SSDs are both faster and more robust. They are affordable and straightforward to implement, easy to use, and searchable. Both, however, are much better suited to being kept in data centers than being transported to and from off-site storage. This is particularly true of hard drives, which are notoriously delicate, but even SSDs benefit from gentle handling.

This is one of the reasons that even companies that still run their data centers increasingly prefer to use the public cloud for off-site data backup storage.

3. Understanding storage in the public cloud

In the public cloud, you pay for exactly what you use for exactly as long as you use it. It, therefore, pays to be economical with your use of resources. In the context of data backup storage, that means doing what you can to minimize the volume of data you hold.

The most obvious (and effective) way to do this is to make sure that your production systems are as clean as possible. They should only hold data that is being actively used. Any other data should either be deleted or archived. The importance of this may come as something of a shock to people used to working with physical storage as this has been priced so affordably for so long that companies can often afford to take a relaxed attitude towards using it. In the cloud, however, it’s vital.

Another big difference between the public cloud and data centers is that it’s much easier to fine-tune your use of storage. It’s strongly recommended to take advantage of this to make further cost savings. In short, you want to segment your data in a way that reflects your business priorities and then assign each segment its recovery time objective. You can then use this to inform your choice of data backup storage speeds.

If you’d like to speak to a reputable and experienced data backup storage partner in Roseville, please click here now to contact Aperio.IT.