Backup Options for Companies and the Remote Backup

In this day and age when corporate organizations and small businesses rely heavily on digital data, modern backup solutions are quite important. Companies need to store a large volume of data. Hence, storage becomes an expense issue which needs to be mitigated by using advanced backup options. Data can be stored on premises, on physical drives or on the cloud. Depending on an organization’s current and future needs, companies can choose from different backup solutions available to them in the market.

Backup options not only encompass platforms such as online clouds, but they also include advanced software that is used to transfer and restore full or incremental data as and when required. Backup solutions have evolved over time. From magnetic disks to USB flash drives, and from blue-ray CDs to remote data servers, they have come a long way. The competition today amongst backup option providers lies in how cost-effective their solution is, and how easily can the data be transferred over to the remote location.

How does data backup work

With so many backup options available in the market today, data backup is not much of a hassle anymore. However, companies need to answer a few important questions to streamline the backup process.

• They should know exactly what and how much data they need to back up in one go or at regular intervals.
• There are different methods to transfer data quickly over the internet which may include compression techniques, segmentation, and the type of backup that needs to be created on the storage platform.
• What platform will be used to create a backup?

There are files that every organization needs, to back up their data, and there are files that are not required on the backup server. Therefore, it is essential that companies focus on data that is most essential to them. Having useful data on the backup server allows organizations to save space, and pay less for data backup services.

Backup Options Available

Another important decision to make while choosing a backup option is the frequency or the regular intervals after which the backup needs to be created. Depending on how much their data varies, organizations can create backups as and when required. An effective strategy is to create a full backup on a weekly or monthly basis, and incremental backups on a daily or weekly basis. This takes us to the next question about what is a full and incremental backup?

Full backup

The term full backup suggests that data needs to be copied from start to finish regardless of when the last backup was made. Although it is a time taking process, full backups allow easy restoration of data in case the local server crashes due to malware attack or any unforeseen calamity. All the user needs is the file location of a full backup and the date at which it was created. The is one of the most common backup options used by companies all over the world.

Incremental backup

People may call it an iterative backup option as well. Incremental backup may sometimes require specialized software that can compare the changes that have been made since the last copy was created. Since only the backup of changed data is created on the server, this backup option is quick, convenient and easy.

Types of platforms for creating a backup

The next step is to decide which platform or storage media to use for creating backups of local data. Backup service providers offer various options to companies in order to safely transfer their data to a remote site. Local data can be transported using a physical drive or through a dedicated internet connection to a cloud service provider. However, there are pros and cons of each. Since physical drives can be directly connected to a computing device, it does not take long to transfer data from a local server to the disk.

This backup option is quite useful when organizations want to transfer a large amount of data without using their internet bandwidth. Physical drives are also quite secure since they do not have to be connected to a public network in order to acquire data from the local server. Cloud services, on the other hand, are offered per month or based on the storage space used by a company. In order to transfer data over the internet, companies need a high-speed internet connection and a software that can encrypt data before it is sent over the network. On the receiving end, cloud service providers decrypt the backup data and secure it on their servers.

Cloud services are one of the most widely used backup options in the market today. There are multiple reasons for this high popularity. Firstly, it does not cost much for organizations to acquire a large storage space that is enough to cater to their backup needs. Secondly, they do not have to spend any cash on setting up a backup server or buying large storage devices. Organizations can create their backup online by using physical devices as well. These cutting-edge storage devices are provided by cloud service providers so that organizations can store their data on the portable disk, which is securely transported to an online database for a quick backup.

Best tools to create a data backup on the cloud

There are multiple backup tools available in the market today that allow companies with various backup options. These include dashboards to monitor the health of backup data and a quick and easy way of incremental backup with a click of a button. Some of the most popular systems include Avamar and R-Studio which are based on RAID or Redundant Array of Independent Disks technology ensuring that data is not lost due to any sort of interruption in the network.

Before implementing an online backup strategy, companies should conduct a thorough research about which platform and backup software they should use to transfer data to and from the storage location. It can help them in saving costs and reducing the amount of time and effort required to complete the process on a regular basis.