Data Backup Service Woodland

What you need to know about data backup services in Woodland

Data is essential to the smooth running of your business. Fortunately, it’s possible to put a robust data backup strategy into place even if you’re an SMB on a tight budget. With that in mind, here’s a quick guide to what you need to know about data backup services in Woodland.

The better you manage your production data, the better your data backup process will be 

If you are dealing with sensitive data (including sensitive data belonging to your own employees) then you must have a process in place for managing this data from input to deletion, possibly via archiving. You must also have a process in place for identifying what data is needed for compliance purposes and ensuring that it is either kept in production or archived for the correct length of time.

It is very much to your advantage to build on these requirements so that you are keeping your data as minimal, clean and relevant as possible. The first advantage of this is that it gives you less data to protect and hence reduces your exposure to security risks. The second advantage of this is that it makes life easier for anyone who needs to use the data since it makes it easier for them to find what they need. The third advantage of this is that it reduces the quantity of data you have in your systems and hence the amount of storage you need.

Even though this is only listed as the third advantage, it is often a very significant one. This means that, as an absolute minimum, you need a robust process for ensuring that all dormant data is identified and either deleted or moved into an archive until it must/can be deleted.

The better you know your data, the better you can fine-tune your data backup process 

In a data center, there’s really little to nothing you can do to finesse your data backup process. Realistically, you’re probably just going to back up everything at the same time onto the same storage device. In the cloud, however, there’s a lot you can do to fine-tune your data backup process and it pays to do so, both literally and figuratively.

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The key point to note is that in the cloud it’s relatively straightforward to assign different Recovery Time Objectives and Recovery Point Objectives to different categories of data. RTOs are exactly what they sound like. They define how long you can go without your data being available to use. RPOs define how long you are prepared to go between data backups or, more specifically, how much data you are prepared to risk losing.

By fine-tuning your RPOs, you can reduce your storage costs by assigning different categories of data to different speeds of storage to different categories of data, according to how quickly you need them back online. Similarly, by fine-tuning your RPOs you can assign most bandwidth to the data you can least afford to lose and vice versa. In this way, you can balance the need to maximize productivity (or to minimize lost productivity) with the need to keep costs manageable, even on a tight budget.

Remember that bandwidth is an important factor in data backup costs 

When thinking about the costs of data backups, probably the first thought which comes to mind is the cost of storage and this is perfectly understandable since it probably accounts for the single biggest percentage of the cost of data backups. The second-biggest percentage, however, is usually the cost of bandwidth.

It has to be acknowledged that anything you can do to reduce the volume of data you back up will also reduce both your storage and bandwidth costs. There are, however, further steps you can take to reduce the cost of bandwidth without having to compromise on your desired RPO.

The main way to do this is to combine full data backups with incremental and/or differential data backups. As their name suggests, full data backups back up all data, regardless of whether or not it has changed since the last data backup. Incremental data backups back up only data which has changed since the last data backup and differential data backups back up only data which has changed since the last full data backup.

While it is necessary to take full data backups from time to time, they are extremely resource-intensive and so their use should usually be minimized. Incremental data backups are the least-demanding type of data back up, but it can be complicated to restore from them and differential data backups essentially split the difference.

You can also use compression to reduce the size of the files. Just be careful to keep this within reasonable limits, otherwise, you can compromise the quality of the data.

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