Customer Backups: File, Image or Both?

By MAXfocus Guest Blog

If you think back 10 years or so, backups were usually performed in a rather predictable way. Companies typically would use backup tapes: inexpensive DATs for SMEs and more pricey LTOs for companies with more data and more money to spend.

It was a similar story in terms of software. While smaller businesses made do with built-in functionality such as Windows Server’s NT Backup, larger, wealthier firms would use specialist software such as Backup Exec or Arcserve. If you’ve been in the IT business for any length of time, you have probably spent plenty of time configuring and wrestling with these products!

The tapes and software products still exist, and plenty of companies use them, but in a recent survey by Ontrack Data Recovery, only 15 percent of 600 respondents reported using tapes as their main backup medium. When this is compared with a Sepator survey from just two years ago which reported 57 percent of companies using tapes, it certainly is clear that the use of traditional tape backup is on the wane.

There are plenty of reasons for this. Cloud backup solutions are growing in popularity, helped by increasingly speedy Internet connectivity. Meanwhile, virtualization and image-based backup technologies are making many people rethink backup from ground up.

So, what should you be recommending to your customers? Let’s first think about traditional backup and image backup in turn:

File Backup

File-level backup does have some advantages: When a user loses a file, finding and restoring it usually is a relatively simple process. Assuming, of course, the user saved it in a location included in the backup job, and that the backup job worked! But as long as file-level backup is well-managed, it can meet this kind of customer requirement very well.

Other aspects of this backup method get more complicated. The use of Exchange or SQL usually means configuring additional “agent” software—at least if you want the ability to restore individual emails or folders of data. And let’s face it, nobody wants to rebuild an Exchange information store to restore a single folder of messages!

In the event of a full system failure you have the files, but rebuilding servers means playing with system state backups, and probably wading through technical documentation in a state of high stress.

Image Backup

Image backup seems almost the antithesis of the traditional alternative. By taking a complete copy of a machine, you are able to restore a server to a previous point in time. Thanks to “bare metal” functionality, some solutions even allow restoration to new hardware, which obviously is great for disaster recovery. Also, a virtual disaster recovery (VDR) offering can save time by automating the recovery and rebuild to the virtual environment, ready to continue working from.  

So, what’s best for your customers? Clearly, no two customers are the same, but there is one golden rule that’s always good to live by when it comes to system backup: Always have more than one alternative.

So, on this basis the answer should be clear: Use both of them, and make sure they are each configured and tested to meet all of your restoration requirements if the other method should fail. Whether you involve the aforementioned tapes in your strategy is up to you—but with 75 percent of companies now using hard drives or cloud services, it’s fair to say you may be stuck in the past if you choose to do so!

Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly, and are part of The VAR Guy's annual platinum sponsorship.