Many companies believe that the best form of protection is to back up all your data. By all, they actually mean everything, since the beginning of time. Now that is a very unreasonable approach, as it may require tons of Giga Bytes of storage space and no company is that flexible with their budget to allow keeping tons of cold, old data. The smart way to do this is use a cloud based backup solution and to figure out what is important and what should be backed up more regularly, rather than backing up everything just for the sake of it. Cloud disaster recovery solutions can be used to save your data from disasters.
Once all your data is backed up, it is not necessary to keep backing up that data in every backup job. There important thing to remember here is that, although all of the company’s data is important but some of it should not be included in frequent backups. For Instance;
1. Cold Data
Cold data or not frequently change data is usually considered as least priority to be backed up regularly. Mainly because it does not change for a long period of time. This includes, emails, scientific readings and other historical data. Once all of it is initially backed up, there is no need to include it in all your regular backups.
2. Workstations
A company has many workstations. Belonging to every employee. Ranging from management to all the way down to interns. There is no need to keep backing up workstations of lower employees regularly and they can be excluded from routine backups.
3. Virtual Machines
Virtual Machines can be spin up in a matter of minutes, unless you want to specifically back up a VM, they should not be included in routine backups as it is relatively a lot easier and faster to spin up and use VMs when needed.
4. File-Level Backups
If your company engages VM-level backups, then there is no use of separate file-level backups. Most backup vendors support virtual mounting of the VMs, this way you can directly access the VM’s file system directly in order to retrieve individual files. Azure cloud connect is also a good option for effective data backups.
Conclusion
The most important thing to understand here is that not all data sets ‘need’ to be backed up, and the reasons have been covered in this article. Cloud based backup solutions can be used and when setting up backup jobs, you should really think; do u I need to back this up? Is this already in the database? This way, you will promote short and efficient backups which would in return ensure, less RTOs and RPOS.
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