Data Backup Storage West Sacramento

What do you need to know about data backup storage in West Sacramento?

Data backups are business essentials that you get from Data Backup Storage West Sacramento. As such, it pays to ensure that they are undertaken properly. This includes choosing the right form of data backup storage. With that in mind here is a quick guide to what you need to know about data backup storage in West Sacramento.

Thinks To be Considered While Data Backup Storage

1. The cloud versus offline data backup storage

If you’re already in the cloud (private or public), then it almost always makes sense to use the public cloud for your data backup storage. The only exception to this is if you are in a private cloud, have extremely sensitive data (and/or an extremely high level of customization), and want the quickest possible recovery time regardless of cost. In that situation, you might want to run a second private cloud and also use it for data backup storage, but this would be an extremely expensive option.

There may also be a case for storing all or at least part of your data archives on physical media, but that is a separate issue.

If you’re in a data center, then you will need to use physical media for your local data backup storage. The question then becomes whether you want to stick with physical media for your off-site data backup or whether you want to use the public cloud.

2. The public cloud and data backup storage

If you are already in the public cloud, then you are clearly in a position to use a second public cloud for data backup storage. It is highly recommended to do so even though it can pose some technical challenges. First of all, it protects you against the consequences of misuse of your accesses, accidental or deliberate. Secondly, it lays the foundations for a business continuity/disaster recovery solution, which protects against any issues with your main provider.

If you’re in a private cloud then you can almost always use the public cloud for data backup storage. Financially, it is generally the best option by a long way. You may find it worth investigating whether or not you can decrypt your data in the public cloud as this would then make it possible to use it as a full business continuity/disaster recovery solution.

If you’re in a data center, then you need to decide whether your priority is maximum security or maximum speed of recovery. If you absolutely must have the highest possible level of security, then physical storage is the better option. If, however, you would prefer the fastest possible recovery, then the cloud is your better option.

3. Choosing an offline storage medium

In theory, there is a wide range of options for offline data backup storage. In practice, there are only two of them which are currently any good for business use. These are hard drives (in various forms) and tapes. SSDs may become a feasible option in the future, but right now they are likely to be far too expensive for most SMBs to use as their main solution.

Tapes were the standard form of data backup storage for many years and are still very popular. It is, however, probably fair to say that a lot of their popularity is due to their established user base. In short, using tapes as data backup storage requires a significant upfront investment in IT infrastructure, such as tape drives. The low cost of the tapes themselves means that over the long term, this investment is recouped and tapes become a very economical solution, but they are expensive to implement.

They are also notoriously slow, at least when used by themselves. This issue can, however, be somewhat resolved by partnering them with SSDs. The SSDs not only act as buffers for the data but also use their indexing capabilities to clean and compress it before passing it to the tape. This results in significant performance improvements at a reasonable cost.

A lot of modern SMBs have, however, switched to hard drives. It’s easy to see why. Hard drives are fairly quick, reasonably affordable, and straightforward to implement and use. Smaller SMBs may even be able to use all-in-one hardware solutions that take care of data backup management as well as data backup storage. In short, hard drives have all kinds of benefits, but they also have one major issue and that is their failure rate.

The issue of hard drives failing is unlikely to be resolved any time soon (if ever). It doesn’t have to be catastrophic, especially since hard drives generally give off some warning signs before they give up completely. It does, however, mean that they need careful management and you may need to budget for the occasionally hard drive data recovery operation.

If you’d like to speak to a reputable and experienced data backup storage partner in West Sacramento, please click here now to contact Aperio.IT.