Challenges of Backup Management

A Backup Article Contributed by V Pradeep

What are the Challenges of a Backup Management

Backing up information or data is one thing, managing it is a different thing altogether. I would like to list some of the major concerns of Backup management in the recent years.

The backup window is shrinking every day. The backup window can be defined as the time available with the administrator to backup all the data the company generated for the day. Conventionally the administrator had to wait till 8:00 pm every evening until everyone left for the day and commence the backup procedure. But with the companies operating 24X7, the backup window is not relevant anymore.

Another hurdle the administrators face is that most companies lack any company wide centralized backup policy. Hence there is no way one can be sure that all the data is being backed up. And since more than 60% of the company's data resides in the personal computers and laptops of the users, the administrator is dependent on the user to start a backup procedure.

Backup can eat into your bandwidth also. If huge data from servers are being backed up, it could actually shutdown the network, which is why such backups are planned during off-peak hours. And as mentioned earlier, off-peak hours are almost a thing of the past. And if personal computers and lap tops have to be backed up, there is no choice to do it, other than doing it during the peak hours, because it is during the peak hours that the personal computers and laptops are on.

Some Solutions for the Backup Management Challenges

By combining incremental backup, multi streaming and backing up to multiple tapes from multiple servers, the backup speeds have been increased considerably and thus dealing with the shrinking backup windows problem. The possibilities of eliminating backup windows altogether by using snap shots, or point-in-time of company data are also being explored.

The problem of major portions of the data on the personal computers and laptops not being backup due to lack of concrete company policies can be taken care by installing softwares on individual machines which initiate the backup process automatically. Of course this comes with a cost, that is, backup isn't constrained to the old "backup window" and can increase network bandwidth usage at uncontrollable, inopportune times.

The bandwidth problem can be effectively solved using incremental backups. Once the full backup is completed, only the changes are backed up. Hence the bandwidth consumed by this process is almost negligible.

Since data is growing at a tremendous rate, and all this data needs to be stored and retrieved when need be. The amount of data being backed up can be reduced because this will help both storage and backup requirements. Most of the data being backed up is redundant, and can easily be eliminated. Statics reveal that, almost 70% of the data is redundant. Eliminating this data as a backup material can greatly reduce total storage space needed.

Future Backup Problems Foreseen

There is abundant data, and it is being generated at an amazing rate. And there is also a lot of money and resources already invested on the storage devices. The future challenge is to manage the existing storage space more effectively and adding only the bare minimum hardware to the system.