Data Backup Services  Lodi

What you need to know about data backup services in Lodi

In the old days of data centers and relaxed data protection laws, SMBs could get away with just putting all their data onto a couple of physical storage devices and transporting one of them to an off-site storage location. Those days, however, are long gone. Now, even SMBs have to take a strategic approach to data backups. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to what you need to know about data backup services in Lodi.

It’s useful to start with the end in mind 

From a technical perspective, the end goal of data backups is usually defined in terms of Recovery Time Objectives and Recovery Point Objectives. For practical purposes, these need to be supplemented by cost management and compliance with the law.

Recovery Time Objectives and Recovery Point Objectives 

These are the twin criteria by which the success or otherwise of data backups is measured. The RTO defines how quickly you need your data back online. The RPO defines how long you can go between data backups. In the days of data centers, you would probably only have one RTO and one RPO for all of your data. In the cloud, however, you can fine-tune this to have different RTOs and RPOs for different categories of data and it can literally pay to do so.

The key point to note is that your RTO will influence the speed of storage you need. Faster storage costs more than slower storage, so if you can split up your data so that you only use the fastest storage for the data which justifies it, you can reduce costs without impacting productivity.

Request Data Backup

Similarly, your RPO will define how much bandwidth you need. This means that if you keep short RPOs for the data which really needs to be kept as up-to-date as possible and lengthen the RPOs for other data, you can reduce your bandwidth usage and hence your costs without any detrimental impact to your business.

Cost management 

There are several factors that will determine how much you pay for your data backups. The most obvious of these are storage and bandwidth and these are probably the most important factors.

Anything you can do to reduce the volume of data you hold in production will reduce the cost of your data backups. This has two key implications. First of all, you want to minimize the data you bring into your production system. In addition to thinking about what you collect (particularly if you are collecting sensitive data), you also need to think about how you collect it. Basically, you want to do whatever you can to avoid duplicates and often the best way to achieve this is to practice standardized data formatting (wherever possible) and robust data validation.

Secondly, you need to ensure that dormant data is removed from your production systems as quickly as possible. If you’re not comfortable deleting it, or you know it can’t be deleted, then put it into a data archive. There can still be a case for keeping data archives on physical storage (since there’s usually no rush to access the data on them), although these days that’s generally done in combination with keeping a cloud data archive and some SMBs are perfectly happy with just cloud data archives.

In the cloud, archival storage is much slower than the storage used for production data and data backups, hence it is priced much more affordably. It, therefore, makes sense to use it as much as you possibly can.

There are further steps you can take to reduce your bandwidth requirements. In particular, you want to consider how often you need to take full data backups versus how often you can take 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 all data which has changed since the last data backup. Differential data backups back up all data which has changed since the last full data backup.

Incremental data backups place the lowest demands on resources, but it can be complicated to restore from them and this can slow down your recovery. Differential data backups basically split the difference between full and incremental data backups.

In addition to using the right types of data backup in the right combination, you can also look to apply the right level of compression to reduce the size of your data backups without compromising the integrity of the data they contain.

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