Technologies such as disk-based backup devices and backup-as-a-service via a specialist third party are radically changing how organisations back up.
One of the issues is the question of duplication of data. The old-style approach, so prevalent in the age of tape backup, is simply to back up everything and retain it for an indefinite period. This often means that the same data is repeatedly backed up.
The ever-increasing amounts of data take up more and more space and lengthen the time each backup takes. Even if a company adopts faster, more reliable disk-based storage technologies, the problem of duplication has to be addressed.
The only way to do this is to take the time to understand the systems architecture and how the various and ever-increasing number of applications integrate with one another.
Only then will it be possible to understand where the critical data actually resides, and then create a definitive backup selection list, thus eliminating duplication.
How Long?
A second set of issues revolves around the question of data retention. The company data-retention policies must be in line with legal requirements. However, most backup administrators do not understand the systems architecture and for how long databases retain historical information and audit trails.
Most modern systems do not discard information at month-end or year-end, so it may not be necessary to retain weeks and months of consecutive backups.
Often the last good backup is sufficient to recover all of the historical information. Understanding this is key to managing the size of the archived backup sets.
Disk-based backup storage is expensive, hence it is imperative to manage this growth. Once the retention policy has been defined, one needs to consider the amount of storage that will be required to create and retain the backup sets accordingly.
Often?
When companies adopt disk-based backup solutions, it becomes easier to consider recovery point objective (RPO) for the critical systems - in this case, the question will revolve around how much data loss the business can be tolerated for each system. One hour? One day? One week?
Faster backup technology can make it feasible to backup more often than once a day thereby reducing the RPO.
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