Data Backup Digest

Even if you’re a small sized business, it’s very likely that you’re going to have a lot of data stored across your systems. It can be amazing how quickly hard drives will fill up. Word projects, spreadsheets, presentations and such can all add up and before you know it you need to expand on your storage.

Storage expansion isn’t always a cheap procedure, so you’d be surprised at the number of businesses who just blindly back up all their data. Not only do they have to pay to store the original data, but also for the backed up copies.

A streamlined back up process is essential when it comes to data protection. Not only will it make it easier and quicker to recover your data should disaster strike, but it’s also going to save money.

A survey of 200 IT professionals was conducted by Sepaton, a provider of data protection systems. They found that more than half of the respondents were attempting to back up over 100TB of data. Of these, 27 percent had between 500TB and 1PB of data being backed up.

A lot of companies are now beginning to encrypt an increasing amount of their data, in response to the growing concern over security. When you encrypt data it will increase the size of it, thus making backups even larger.

Of course, this amount of data isn’t necessarily a bad thing in itself. It might be that these businesses just naturally hold a lot of data. The problem begins when more data is backed up than it needs to be; perhaps Windows files or duplicated files.

There are methods that can be undertaken to ensure that the right amount of data is being backed up. If you’re using a decent backup program then it should have incremental backup. What this means is that it will only update data that has been changed, rather than constantly making copies of everything, regardless of whether that data has been edited.

You should also ensure that you’re backing up data that actually needs to be saved. For example, Windows and program files don’t need to be backed up. These can be restored from the source (like the disc that they came on) and making copies of these types of files is just wasting storage space.

It never hurts to reassess your backup process every now and then. Although it might have been a good solution when implemented, things do change and you might discover that there’s a better way of doing it. For example, the system may have originally been set up to take a full back up every month. Instead, perhaps try doing a daily incremental backup over night while the system isn’t in use. It’ll save time, speed and storage.

Having huge amounts of data that is being backed up is not a problem in itself. The problem is when this data is useless or duplicated. Ensure that you stay on top of your backup solution to make sure it is efficient and not wasting space.