It might seem obvious that storage matters for any business today. Without somewhere to save customer data and employee records, how would a company build marketing plans, employee evaluations, or just about anything else it needs to run? But because storage keeps growing, it pays to have a data backup solution planned out for both primary storage and backups.
Be Smart About Your Data
First, be smart about the data itself. Copy and paste files from everyone without a plan, and you will fill up your storage and backup capacity fast. Deduplication technology and smart backup tools, like the ones behind the Vault Networks backup solution, keep you from storing countless copies of the same file. Two or three 1 MB files might not sound like much, but multiply that across every employee, every day of the year, and you can eat through storage fast, all for extra copies of data you already backed up.
A Data Backup Solution Built for Granular, Continuous Backups
Along the same lines, granular backups are the most effective way to protect your systems, since they use the drives devoted to storage far more efficiently than simple snapshots of existing systems. Our backup system is built to be granular and continuous, saving data in increments as fast as every 15 minutes, and it only saves new or changed files, so nothing gets wasted on OS files or data already sitting in cold storage.
Scale Storage the Right Way
Scaling storage, rather than just buying bigger drives, is a smart move too. Moving to a whole new storage architecture can eat up a lot of time, but scaling out by adding hard drives or increasing backup capacity is comparatively easy. The one mistake to avoid is treating new drives in your storage system as backups. A backup needs to stay completely independent of your primary storage so it can do its actual job. A backup that goes offline right along with your primary storage is not much of a backup, so do not fall into that trap no matter how much extra room your central storage seems to have.
Understand the Real Risk of a Weak Data Backup Solution
Finally, understand the risk of skipping a backup plan altogether, or relying on a less-than-ideal data backup solution, such as employees backing up files to USB drives. Good questions to ask when sizing up that risk include:
- How much time will a recovery waste?
- How much will the actual recovery cost, including any expenses beyond wages paid to employees or vendors?
- If data is truly lost, how much time and money will it take to recreate it?
- Will you lose customers if you lose data?
- Will your backup system actually work?
These are all important questions, especially the last two. Plenty of organizations still lean on tape backups because they have gotten so cheap, even though drive failure data shows real reliability risk there. That risk connects directly to losing customers. Recover lost data before it touches any of them, and most customers stay understanding or barely notice a system failure. Once it does touch them, they are far less forgiving.
Vault Networks offers a continuous backup service, built on our storage platform, that protects any Vault Networks server or colocation customer on our highly redundant, highly available SAN system. Backups handle deduplication and save only files that have been updated or changed, in intervals as fast as every 15 minutes, something older backup techniques simply cannot match. To learn more about how Vault Networks can back up your system, reach out to us by calling (305) 735-8098 option 2 or by emailing sales@vaultnetworks.com.
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