Data backup storage Sacramento

Backing up your data is one of the most important tasks in business. A large part of its success is based on the storage you use. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to data backup storage in Sacramento.

If you’re already in the cloud it usually makes sense to stay in the cloud 

There are lots of reasons for using the cloud, but most of them revolve around its flexibility. It therefore usually makes sense to continue to benefit from this flexibility by using the cloud for data backup storage.

If you’re in a data center, you can combine physical media with the cloud 

If you’re in a data center, then you will need to organize physical storage media to store your local data backup. You then have to decide whether you are going to use physical media to store your off-site data backup or whether you are going to use the cloud.

The advantage of using physical media for data backup storage is that it is offline and therefore protected against cyberattacks. The disadvantage of using physical media for off-site data backup storage is that you have to spend time carefully transporting it to your off-site storage facility and, even more importantly, retrieving it from storage if you need it for recovery.

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The advantage of using the cloud for off-site data backup storage is that it eliminates the need to transport data from A to B using the road network. This advantage is becoming increasingly important, especially in urban areas such as Sacramento where road congestion is much more likely to be an issue than internet congestion. The disadvantage is that your data stays online, but this disadvantage is somewhat negated by the fact that reputable cloud providers offer excellent security and the fact that you can keep your data encrypted.

The basics of physical storage media 

In principle, there is a wide variety of physical media you can use for data backup storage. In practice, for the most part, only two of them make sense in the real world, at least for SMBs. These are hard drives and tapes. SSDs are currently far too expensive for the average SMB to consider them as their main storage medium and CDs/DVDs have all kinds of disadvantages including being extremely fragile as well as very cumbersome.

That leaves hard drives in various forms (e.g. NAS and SAN) and tapes. Hard drives have become very popular due to the value for money they offer. They have fairly brisk read/write speeds (slower than SSDs but much faster than tapes) and are priced fairly affordably. What’s more, they can be used without the need for additional hardware, whereas tapes need to be used with tape drives, which are very much an investment purchase. That said, tapes themselves are very affordable so overall they are still an economical option.

The main problem with hard drives is their notorious failure rate. In the public cloud, this is your vendor’s problem. In a data center, it is yours. Hard drive failures don’t have to be catastrophes. They generally come after a bit of warning, during which time you can get your data off the drive. What’s more, if all else fails, there are hard drive data recovery vendors in Sacramento. They are, however, an inconvenience you’ll inevitably need to manage.

Tapes, by contrast, have outstanding reliability and, over the long term, they’re very economical. The main issue with them is that by modern standards they are painfully slow. This issue can be alleviated by using a “disk-to-tape” approach where data is run through an SSD first. The SSD buffers the data while cleaning and compressing it, thus giving much better results than using tapes alone at a much lower cost than using SSDs as your main storage medium. That said, tapes still don’t match hard drives for speed.

The basics of storage in the cloud 

In the cloud, you pay for exactly what you use for exactly as long as you use it. This is a strong incentive to use the minimum level of resources necessary to achieve any specific goal. The most obvious way to achieve this is to minimize the quantity of data you hold and this is indeed highly recommended.

The less obvious way is to segment your data and categorize it according to its role in your business. Then you use the slowest (and hence most affordable) form of storage you reasonably can for each class of data. It may take a little trial and error to work out what this is, but in the cloud, testing the viability of storage speeds is as easy as selecting the right options on a menu. There’s no need to go out and buy physical hardware.

If you’d like to speak to a reputable and experienced data backup storage partner in Sacramento, please click here now to contact Salient IT.