Remote data backup planning issues

Remote data backup requires careful preparation and planning stage before you can be sure that performance will be adequate. Understanding of how much data you need to backup in a typical evening is the first important issue to be considered when planning remote backup strategy. When you know approximate data level to backup daily it’s time to select remote backup service which fits your budget and offering an adequate bandwidth.

Another factor gaining importance for remote data backup is data deduplication or intelligent compression as it also called. Typical remote backup may create many copies of the same file. Data deduplication used to avoid creating redundant information. It only makes one reserve copy of the file and provides pointers to other file iterations. So if you have 100 copies of 1 MB file, ordinary backup will use 100 MB of storage for them, while data deduplication need storage for 1 MB file and references for additional copies. 1 MB instead of 100 MB is a difference which makes reasonable enough to use only data deduplication supporting remote data backup.

The third issue with planning remote data backup strategy is possibility of connection failure. Business impact of link problem must be identified to make plans for minimization negative effects. Temporary connection problems must be corrected by repeat of remote backup attempt several hours later when the connection will return.

See also How to Backup Online