Once a business clears the financial hurdle and begins to plan their data protection strategy the choices can appear daunting. Do they select tape or disk? Apply differential or incremental backups? How much will a new system cost and how much time will it take to implement? What data should be included in the backup? This article attempts to address these concerns.
A Breece Hill White Paper
Simpli?ed Data Protection
For Small to Medium Businesses
November 2006
By Breece Hill, LLC246 S. Taylor AvenueLouisville, CO 80027www.breecehill.com2 Simpli?ed Data Protection For Small to Medium Businesses
DATA STORAGE REQUIREMENTS Alternative backup methods, such as differential or incremental There is a data explosion taking place. Industry analysts agree backups, conserve time and resources and minimize strain on that company data stored on laptops, desktops, and servers the network. This is where the simplicity typically ends. doubles annually. Incremental and differential backup strategies reduce a company's backup window by eliminating daily full backups, but have This rapid expansion of both necessary and unnecessary data disadvantages that may offset the gains. can strain company resources as they grow. Consider how a simple, manageable Excel spreadsheet can migrate and multiply Differential Backupsinto several additional, more complex documents with Differential backups record all new, updated or deleted ?les embedded images, links, and charts. since the last full backup, capturing ?les at points in time. Let's look at a typical scenario.Every company, no matter how small, needs to back up its data. It's that simple. During any given week a company could run a full backup between Friday and Sunday. Differential backups are then run for SMBs today are faced with the fragile balance of operating costs ?les that have changed between Sunday and Monday; Sunday increasing while business continues to grow. As companies grow, and Tuesday; Sunday and Wednesday; and ?nally, Sunday and data management requirements also grow exponentially and Thursday. Thursday's backup would then include all changes the IT staff feels the strain. Each new server increases backup since Sunday. requirements; backup windows shrink; and determining what to back up and how often quadruples in complexity and cost. Differential backups offer faster restore times and greater ?exibility for the user; however, this type of backup will result Once a business clears the ?nancial hurdle and begins to plan in redundant data sets. Since any changes on Tuesday are also their data protection strategy the choices can appear daunting. captured on the Thursday backup, this approach uses up more Do they select tape or disk? Apply differential or incremental storage capacity and takes longer and longer to complete. backups? How much will a new system cost and how much time will it take to implement? What data should be included Incremental Backupsin the backup? This article attempts to address these concerns. Incremental backups remember which ?les were captured on the previous backup, regardless of whether that backup TRADITIONAL BACKUP STRATEGIES was full or partial. Using the same scenario, a full backup is again Deciding what data to back up should be the ?rst step. performed over the weekend. Incremental backups are then Businesses should identify ?les that change frequently, and run for ?les that have changed between Sunday and Monday; any programs and ?les that keep the business up and running. Monday and Tuesday; Tuesday and Wednesday; and Wednesday and Thursday. Subsequent incremental backups only capture Once systems and ?les are identi?ed the next step is to ?les that have changed since the last incremental process, so perform a full backup of all these systems, applications and data the data load is smaller and the backup time is reduced.?les. A duplicate archive should be created and kept off-site for disaster recovery purposes.
If many system ?les contain unique user settings and passwords that change often, a daily backup schedule may be needed. Unfortunately, the cost and time required to complete full backups each day is impractical, especially for a company with large amounts of data or limited backup windows. Simpli?ed Data Protection For Small to Medium Businesses 3
Unfortunately, it takes longer to restore data from an TAPE ROTATIONincremental backup. Data from the most recent full backup As backup and restore tasks become more complex, and data must be located and restored, and then data from all the continues to grow, it is generally advisable to begin a standard incremental backups must be restored in the proper sequence. tape rotation scheme. Tape rotation allows the backup media For example, if you want to restore a ?le fro... [download for more]
