Online Data Backup Sacramento

What you need to know about online data backup services in Sacramento

Data backups are nothing new. In fact, they have been around in one form or another since the earliest days of IT. For most of that time, however, data backups have been taken to physical storage devices. Online data backups are relatively new. In many ways, they are essentially identical to offline data backups, but there are also some important differences between them. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to what you need to know about online data backup services in Sacramento.

There are various factors involved in how much you pay for online data backup services

Each online data backup service in Sacramento will have its own approach to billing. There are, however, three factors that will probably have a major influence on your online data backup costs regardless of what IT services vendor you use. These are the amount of storage you use, the amount of bandwidth you use and the frequency with which you need to access your online data backups.

While a lot of companies focus on the first two points, it’s important to remember that a data backup is something you take in the hope that you won’t need to use it. Your Plan A should always be to keep your production systems up and running. If you’re having issues with this, then you should be addressing them, if necessary with the help of an IT services vendor, rather than relying on being able to restore from data backups.

Managing storage costs

For most companies, storage costs will be the single biggest factor in determining how much you pay for your online data backups. At the end of the day, your storage costs will be determined by the volume of production data you hold, so there will be an effective floor to the costs. That said, it’s worth doing what you can to get as close as possible to that floor.

Firstly, you need to decide how many online data backups you need to take. As a rule of thumb, it makes sense to stick with the tried-and-tested 3-2-1 approach. In other words, you will have three copies of your data (your production copy plus two data backups), held over two media (or clouds) with one copy being kept off-site (in a second cloud). This is usually enough to ensure robustness without generating excessive costs.

Secondly, you need an effective system for ensuring that dormant data is moved promptly out of your production system. You should only be backing up data you genuinely need for production. If data is dormant then, by definition, you are not using it. This means you should either delete it or move it into a data archive. Remember that the costs of holding excess data will be multiplied by the number of online data backups you need to take.

Thirdly, you need to keep control over what goes into your production system in the first place. You should aim to minimize the amount of data you collect (especially if it’s sensitive data, including sensitive data belonging to your employees). You also want to enforce firm data formatting standards and apply data validation strategies where possible so you reduce the likelihood of having duplicates and/or random data items floating around your production system (and clogging up your data backup process).

Managing bandwidth costs

Anything you can do to minimize the volume of data you hold will also reduce your bandwidth usage and hence costs. You can, however, take this a significant step further by combining full data backups with incremental and/or differential data backups.

Full data backups back up all data, regardless of whether or not it has changed since the last time the data was backed up. They are extremely resource-intensive, so most companies will want, or need, to keep them to a minimum.

Incremental data backups only back up data which has changed since the last data backup. They require minimal resources, but their nature means that it can be complicated to restore from them. This can be an issue if your priority is time to recovery.

Differential data backups only back up data which has changed since the last full data backup. They require more resources to perform than incremental data backups, but it’s often easier to restore from them.

You can also use compression to reduce the size of your online data backup file. This can make a meaningful difference to the size of “heavy” content such as video. You do, however, have to make sure that you keep the compression level light enough to avoid damage to the integrity of the data.

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