Data Backup Digest

You’ve created the best backup plan possible. Every single byte of data is replicated. Whenever you make a change it’s captured. You’ve got multiple copies, some off-site, all secured with the best encryption.

Then one day disaster strikes and your data is corrupted. It’s unrecoverable and you need to restore from backup. You load up your backup and find the situation is about to get even worse: your backup system hasn’t been working as intended.

You might think this is an unlikely scenario, but you’d be surprised. Just the same way that people think regular data loss will never happen to them, many don’t even think about their backups. If you take multiple copies then you’re safer, but those only taking one are still putting themselves at risk.

Rather than manually checking your backups, which is a time consuming thing, it’s recommended that you either employ a third-party backup provider or use software which will automatically do it for you.

One such vendor is CloudBerry Lab, a vendor of backup and management solutions for public cloud storage services. They have introduced the Backup Consistency Check to their suite, which allows users to verify that their backups will work properly should the time for restoration ever come.

“Backup verification enables businesses to identify corrupted backups, so they can replace them with good backups before they are needed,” says Alexander Negrash, marketing director at CloudBerry Lab. “For an IT manager, few things are worse than losing data and then discovering that the backup won’t recover because it’s corrupt. Without backup verification, these corrupt backups act like landmines that are only detected when they blow up in the face of IT.”

There are a number of reasons why your data can get corrupted during the backup process. This could be a whole host of reasons, like users not backing up the right data in the first place, the cloud provider suffering an outage, drives getting full, and so on.

With CloudBerry Lab you can schedule your backups (or use real-time backups) and then use their new feature to track each backup individually and remotely. No more time wasting loading up each backup individually to check its consistency, you can do it easily and on the fly.

Within an enterprise, one of the biggest concerns is reliability. You want a backup plan that is reliable – that means your provider, your software and your device are all reliable. Negrash claim that CloudBerry achieve all of this, working with businesses to get something which best suits their needs.

The company also offer full 256-bit AES encryption, with the keys controllable by the end users only. This means that the provider isn’t able to access your data without that key – something of vital importance when you’re handing potentially confidential data to a third party.

“It’s absolutely critical that the business encrypt their data before sending it to the cloud and that no one but the business controls the encryption key that can unlock the data,” says Negrash. "Otherwise, there’s no guarantee that the data is safe from prying eyes."