While planning the subject of damage protection many companies are considering and testing only the process of copying the data into other drives or locations. Omitting the process a copy reconstruction is a serious mistake.
The main task which should be accomplished by a backup system is copying the data from a production system into another resource, drive or even location. The technology has evolved –starting from transferring the information to a tape by means of simple devices, through systems that realize the incremental and differential backups ending on a radical reduction of the volume of storage data by means of deduplication and compression. The source of a backup has also changed – there are large machines of the mainframe class and huge servers of a UNIX type and wide environments of dispersed data reconstruction in server Linux and Windows systems or virtualized environments. Apart of big changes in the model of data reconstruction the backup is still concentrated on copying and restoring the functionality of a system to the same data conversion structure. Virtualization has changed the vision of the work in the IT as it had radically expedited the process of system implementation. The old backup model does not keep up with this process.
The most important is not ‘backup’, but ‘restore’
The agility of a backup system can be checked in only one way: by means of restoring the data in such way in which the system has been designed. In many implementations in the first tests it came out that the process of data restoring lasted far more longer than it was expected. Efficiency problems and problems connected with the accordance with the used software or drives have appeared. Sometimes there are even critical failures: a compiled copy was not complete or was damaged and it was impossible to check things out in other way than through restoring it to a test environment. Problems can be also connected with the efficiency of the connection between the backup servers and also with the process of retrieving the information from a tape drive.
# to be continued
Offsite storage 