Online Data Backup Roseville

What you need to know about online data backup services in Roseville

Online data backups are now the standard for modern businesses. If you’re in the cloud, then they are really the only option which makes any sense. If you’re in a data center, then it may make sense to take a backup on physical media and store it locally. Even in a data center, however, you’re probably going to use an online data backup as an extra safeguard.

Online data backups work very similarly to their traditional counterparts but there are also some nuances which it is helpful to understand. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to what you need to know about online data backup services in Roseville.

You need to know where your online data backup services vendor is located

If you do an internet search on the term “online data backup services in Roseville”, the chances are that your results will contain a mixture of online data backup services vendors who are actually in Roseville and online data backup services vendors who offer services in Roseville, but who are located elsewhere.

You need to know which is which and in the latter case, where, exactly they are located. For example, you may be fine stretching a point to include online data backup services vendors in Sacramento, but not so keen on stretching it to include online data backup services vendors on the other side of the country, let alone overseas.

The key point to remember is that you are responsible for your data, including any data held in online data backups. If anything untoward happens to that data, law enforcement and compliance regulators will come after you, not your IT services vendors.

This means that you need to ensure not only that your IT services contracts require your IT services vendors to fulfill your legal obligations but also that you can enforce those contracts in the real world, rather than just in theory. This means it’s very much recommended to stick with IT services vendors who are genuinely local to you.

The less data you hold in your production systems, the less data you will need to back up

Admittedly this is also true of traditional data backups, but it is much more important when using the cloud and online data backups. With traditional data backups, you buy physical storage upfront and then use it as you see fit. Theoretically, carrying excess data means that you end up buying more storage than you need, but in practice, physical storage has been so affordable for so long that this was generally a non-issue even for SMBs.

In the cloud, however, you pay for exactly what you use for exactly as long as you use it. This means that poor data management is directly and continually penalized. Those penalties are applied not only to the production system but also to the online data backups as these are exact copies of your production data, hence any issues are mirrored.

Purge dormant data promptly

As an absolute minimum, you want to get dormant data out of your production systems. Ideally, you should delete it unless there is a specific reason for keeping it (like compliance). If you know you need to keep it, or nobody is prepared to authorize its deletion, then at least move it into a data archive. This will not only lower your storage costs but also reduce the bandwidth you use for data backups (and restores) and hence lower both costs and time.

If you are archiving data purely because nobody is confident deleting it, you might want to try analyzing it to see if there are any indications of issues with your data capture. For example, if you identify fragments and duplicates of data items, then it’s probably a sign you need to clean up your data-capture process.

For completeness, you also need a process to ensure that dormant data is ultimately deleted from data archives. This is usually obligatory for sensitive data. Even if it isn’t, or your data isn’t sensitive, costs do still mount up in archival storage. They just mount up more slowly.

Remember that there is also a cost for bandwidth

There are two ways you pay for bandwidth. The first is the direct cost of data-transfer charges and the second is the cost of time while your data moves from A to B. For both reasons it makes sense to think about how you are using bandwidth. One of the nice features of online data backups is that you can usually set individual Recovery Point Objectives for different categories of data. This means that you can focus your bandwidth usage on the data which is regularly updated and scale back on the bandwidth you use for data which is less frequently used.

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