Deciding on backup and recovery options is becoming one of the most important decisions that businesses are having to make in relation to their company data. There are a variety of ways for businesses to achieve their backup and recovery goals but the main two ways for them to achieve it is through backup and replication.
The Pros and Cons of Backups:
“Backup” is generally defined as the process of making an additional copy of your business’s data and allowing it to be restored if the original copy is lost or becomes damaged. Once your data has been backed up, you can access it to restore data to an earlier time if it has been damaged or made unusable by corruption, user error, and hardware failure or loss.
The pros of using backups can be found in costs, tools, and automation. Backups of data are usually at a lower cost to businesses since you only pay for what you use. Because of this benefit, this makes backups an ideal choice for businesses with low data volume. Another benefit of using backups are web interface tools that allow the user to access the data easily and restore it when needed. Additionally, the process can be automated. Backups are traditionally pre-scheduled so you don’t have to worry about if they have been completed.
The cons of using backups are almost all centered around the speed of the process. Since backups rely on your connection speed, backups and restorations can take a long time to perform. In addition, restorations through this method have to be done manually and can be tedious to perform, requiring supervision. Due to the time, that system backups and data restoration takes, backups are not considered the best option for businesses with large volumes of data.
The Pros and Cons of Replication:
Replication is the process of copying and moving your business data from one storage system to another so that is can be quickly recovered in the event of a disaster. The main two ways that replication is achieved is through synchronous replication and asynchronous replication.
During synchronous replication, when data is saved on the primary system, the copy is overridden immediately with the new data so that there is no downtime between the point of saving and the redundancy being updated.
During asynchronous replication, your data is saved to your primary storage first with a slight delay before it copies over your backup data. This form of replication also uses snapshots, which are point and time saves of your data in case you need to restore your company data to a very specific time before a disaster or system malfunction.
While synchronous and asynchronous replication methods both have their own pros and cons, we will focus on their combined ones. The main pros of replication are that there will be little to no downtime or data loss in the event of a disaster. This makes it the leading contender when choosing disaster recovery options for your business. Additionally, replication allows for less overall disk space usage due to the snapshot system, which essentially produces “summaries” of your data, only making changes to files that were changed since the last backup. The main cons of replication can be found in the higher costs due to needed equipment and software.
Building A Plan That Works:
Each business has their own idea of which backup or replication plan will work for them and their data needs. The important thing to remember is that both backup and replication offer your business unique tools when it comes to storage, recovery, and backup options, and what may work for one business may not work for another. A good way to decide how to move forward is identifying your business backup and recovery goals, and then combine the use of backup and replication options to build a plan that incorporates both and allows you to have backups that you can use and restore as needed throughout the day, as well as the confidence of knowing that if disaster strikes, your business will immediately be restored so that work can continue.
