Data Backup Solutions

All companies need to consider their strategy for data backup. Backups are needed for 2 major reasons. One is to recover data that may have been lost due to deletion or corruption. Studies have shown that almost 70% of people surveyed have admitted to losing data on their home computers. The second reason backups are needed is to recover data from an earlier time.

For an affordable and successful data backup solution for small to medium size businesses, one way to accomplish this is to perform daily disk to disk backups, and a copy to tape. This would be done by: Data Backup Solutions

• A weekly full backup of all data to disk and a copy to tape on the weekend.
• A daily incremental backup to disk and a copy to tape every day Monday to Friday.

The disk backups have a retention period of one week. The retention period for the tapes depends on the business requirements for restore purposes. Typically the daily incremental and weekly tape is kept for one month and then recycled. The last weekend tape of each month is kept for one to seven years depending on compliance or legal requirements.

Whatever the retention period you choose, the important thing to understand is that the disk backups are for restoring data going back a week. The tapes are for restoring data going back longer than a week or in case of a disaster situation. For example if something happens to the data center or your office space and the IT department has to rebuild your servers.

It is also critical that the daily tapes be sent off site to a secure location every day to a safe data records facility such as Securit or Iron Mountain. Many companies may simply choose to have an office staff take the daily tape home every day and this approach has its own risks. Data storage facilities ensure tapes are stored in a fireproof safe.

The following hardware requirements are needed to ensure the success of this type of a solution:

• A dedicated server with enough disk space to hold two full backups and six days of incremental backups of data.
• A physical tape drive or a tape autoloader.
• An enterprise backup software such as Symantec backup Exec, Arcserv, IBM TSM etc.

Need help to structure your successful data backup solution? Give us a call at 1-866-320-8922 and we would be happy to assist you! Mantralogix is proud to work with many strategic partners who can be part of the solution depending on your needs!