Cloud: Cloud Backup /= Cloud Archiving

This is a guest post from Patrick Jobin at StoragePipe Solutions, a provider of world-class corporate data protection solutions including online backup and recovery, electronic archiving and business continuity.

Despite its mainstream acceptance, Software-as-a-Service is still a very new field.  And when it comes to data protection in the cloud, there are still many terms that are not yet well-understood by all. For this reason, “online archiving” and “online backup” are often believed to be the same, although they are – in fact – quite different from each other.

Online backup is great for automating the disaster recovery process. Instead of manually backing up to tape at the end of every day, the entire process is automated to run in the background.

Another great benefit of online backup is that it can help you improve your “restore point objectives”.  Instead of backing up every 24 hours, you can now back up every few minutes. This minimizes the amount of data you could possibly lose from a disk failure.

The only problem with this approach comes when you’re trying to back up extremely large amounts of data.  Not only does this cause longer backup windows, but it can also negatively affect emergency recovery times.

And backups aren’t the only problem. Excessive data storage can also cause a burden on IT systems by needlessly using up server resources. (This is why email quotas are such a pain for email server administrators)

For smaller organizations, the term “data archiving” is probably not used very often.  But as you company grows, and your data storage requirements become more sophisticated, you will probably need to start streamlining your servers by moving seldom-used files somewhere else to free up space.

This is why many companies will set up archiving policies that take inactive or older data off of the primary servers and store it in an alternate location.  This way, server resources are freed up, and backup/recovery times are shortened.

Here’s another way to think about it:

• A backup is something that happens very often… because files are constantly changing.  This could be once a day, or many times per hour.  Also, backups keep many different versions of the files in case one of the more recent copies becomes corrupted.
• Archiving is something that happens only once.  You only need a single snapshot of the file, because this file never changes.  A good example of an archival file would be a scanned contract or an old e-mail.  Neither of these two files will ever change again.

(Please Note: These are very rough, inaccurate definitions… and there are certainly exceptions to each. I just wanted to illustrate some key concepts in a simple way.)

Another important feature that differentiates the two is that backup data is usually much more critical than archival data.  (Once again, there are exceptions) That’s why backups need to be performed within the shortest possible window of time, and also retrieved quickly when needed.  The best way to accomplish this would be to maximize the amount of data that you archive… while minimizing the volume of data that needs to be backed up.

As you can see, online archiving and online backup are completely different, and not interchangeable at all. But they complement each other well, and knowing how to use both together can help you reduce your IT costs while improving the disaster recovery process for your organization.

This is a guest post from Patrick Jobin at StoragePipe Solutions, a provider of world-class corporate data protection solutions including online backup and recovery, electronic archiving and business continuity.