Business Data Backup Services Placerville

In the 21st century, data is what drives business. Losing access to it for a short period can be massively inconvenient (and potentially expensive). Losing it completely can be catastrophic. Fortunately, it’s fairly straightforward to protect your business data. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to business data backups in Placerville.

Your production system is the basis of your data backup strategy

If you keep your production data in good order, then your business data backups will largely take care of themselves. First of all, you need to control what data goes into your production systems. Limit it to what you actually need (sensitive data) or what you really want (other data). Make sure that it’s full and accurate, not just valid.

The difference is that accurate data reflects reality. Valid data just passes automated checks. In principle, the one should imply the other, but in practice, this largely depends on how well the user enters the data and how well they cooperate with the collection process (especially external users). Because of this, it can be very helpful to make it clear why you want the data, especially if you’re collecting personal data.

You also need to keep the right type of data in the right speed of storage, which may vary according to where it is in its life cycle.

Choosing the right storage speed for your data 

If you can categorize your data effectively, then you can assign different categories of data to different speeds of storage according to how quickly it’s needed. The hard part about this is categorizing your data and deciding how slow you can go. This can take a bit of trial and error and users may not be thrilled during this process. It is, however, worth taking the time to do it properly as it can really save you money on your production data and this can then feed through into further savings.

Your storage speed informs your Recovery Time Objective

If users can wait for data in production, then they can presumably wait for it in a data recovery situation. This means that you can lengthen your recovery time objective and this means that you can use slower storage in your online databases of which there should usually be two.

You need to move dormant data swiftly out of your production systems 

This follows on from the previous point. Dormant data is data that has fallen out of active use. This means that it should be either deleted or moved into a data archive, in that order of preference. It should only be held in a data archive for as long as it is needed. It is usually mandatory to delete sensitive data as soon as the compliance period has ended. It is highly recommended to delete all data once it has ceased to be needed (for compliance or any other purpose).

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That said, if you encounter resistance to deletion, you might want to consider dumping data onto a physical storage device. This is far from ideal, but it’s probably better than paying cloud storage costs for data which is highly unlikely ever to be used.

You can set different RPOs for different categories of data 

Your Recovery Point Objective basically defines how long you can go without backing up your data. It therefore indirectly determines how much bandwidth you use. Since bandwidth essentially translates as “data-transfer charges”, it makes sense to keep your shortest RPOs for the data which is updated most frequently and scale back on backing up the data which is updated less often.

You can save even more bandwidth by using different data backup techniques

Even though storage is the most obvious cost for business data backups, bandwidth matters too. Setting individual RPOs is a good start but you can, and usually should take this a lot further.

The time may come when full data backups become the standard for all situations, but if it does it will probably be some time in the future. Right now full data backups are far too resource-intensive to use regularly. This means you need to combine them with incremental and/or differential data backups.

Incremental data backups only back up data which has changed since the last data backup. They require minimal resources to perform but it can be difficult (read slow) to restore from them.

Differential data backups only back up data which has changed since the last full data backup. They require more resources than incremental data backups but make for easier restorations.

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