As a business owner, you are forced to juggle numerous responsibilities to guarantee your venture’s success. However, one of the tasks you should leave to an expert is the backing up of your computer servers. The servers are today’s filing cabinets, and they hold so much information, which is vital for your business’ operation. In case your servers fail due to a security breach, software malfunction, or a natural disaster, this can spell doom for your entire operation.
Agencies offering business IT solutions will have various options in store for the backing up of your computer servers. These solutions are designed to save all your data without any errors, reduce the load on your bandwidth usage and computing resources, and minimize your storage space. The following are a few of the alternatives you have for backing up your servers:
Full Backup
All copies of your files are stored automatically according to a set schedule. Although the files are stored in a compressed format, they still require considerable space and might lead to heavy access on your backup disks and consume your network bandwidth. It is, however, straightforward to restore a file when using a full server backup since all you need is to key in its name, date, and location. Although comprehensive, this method of server backup might be considered overkill for small organizations since files that remain unchanged will be stored multiple times.
Incremental Backup
This option will only back up the files that have been changed or created since the previous backup session. Hence, the data volume in an incremental backup is smaller than that in full backup, so this type of backup saves space and uses minimal network bandwidth. However, this option increases your computing overhead since each file is compared to that in the last backup to determine any alterations. It is also complicated to locate a file in this backup method as you may need multiple iterations to get it.
Differential Backup
This works much like an incremental backup, but unlike the latter, it will store only all new and updated file from your server’s last full backup. If for instance your full backup is done on Sunday and a file altered on Monday, this file will be stored during every differential backup until you conduct a full backup. Although it simplifies the recovery of your file, a differential server backup will need more network bandwidth and storage space than that used in an incremental backup.
Virtual Full Backup
This uses a database for the tracking and management of your backed-up data. A full copy of your files will be stored only once and will remain unchanged, provided its storage medium remains unchanged. A virtual full backup will periodically synchronize your backup data to your database and is often automatically handled by backup software.
Once you get the server backup option that works best for your company, your next step is to choose a backup storage destination. Some of your available options include external hard drives, network storage, USB media, tape drives, and file sharing devices. More often than not, an IT expert will recommend the use of multiple storage destinations to spread out your risks.