Comprehensive network protection to fit your company’s IT budget should be music to the ears of anyone managing multiple servers and workstations. Affordable continuous data protection comes in the form of disk-based backup and data storage management solutions -- providing peace of mind knowing that your entire network is protected.
Just like an insurance policy, you set up your backup solution once and then go about your business. When digital disasters such as malware attacks, failed software installations and automatic updates, accidental file deletions and OS corruptions happen, the effects are minimized through the use of the backup solution’s recovery features.
When you need to maximize your existing data storage space or need a performance boost without spending more for additional hardware, Hard Disk Drive (HDD) partitioning utilities come in handy.
Consider these best practices towards optimal data storage management and protecting your company’s second most important asset (people being the most important): Your company’s data, systems and all custom configurations.
Why is having a disk-based backup solution so important?
As businesses grow, the creation of data grows, and the demand for more storage space intensifies. With more data to protect, the greater the consequence if lost due to digital disasters and the more important it is to optimize its storage environment for on-going maintenance, disaster recovery, secure archiving and optimal performance when writing to (backing up) or reading from (recovering) the storage devices. Implementing a strategy that considers longevity through proper data storage management configurations as well as protecting servers and workstations in their current state with disk-based backup software is an easy way to have the same levels of protection that the larger
Business data can reside on workstations, a Windows file server; or on a critical application server like Exchange, SQL. Typical network implementations for setting up a backup/recovery solution start with backup software installed on a server operating system. This ensures that business-critical data can be quickly (and remotely) backed up and recovered while minimizing the related IT costs. The chosen solution should provide recovery for both network data and operating systems / system settings and configurations.
Most disk-based solutions offer Sector and/or File Backup Methods, each of a slightly different technology.
Sector and file backup comparison
A sector-based backup is generated by creating an image (or a snapshot) of the entire hard drive or its separate partitions. It not only includes the contents of all user-created files, but additionally contains the exact structure of all directories, information about file allocation, file attributes and other related data. Sector-based backups enable the successful processing of system partitions or encrypted partitions of any file system type, no matter what kind of information they contain.
In contrast, a file-based backup takes into account a file system’s structure and only functions on a file or folder level. Thus it is very efficient when archiving separate files or folders, but will in no way help you back up an entire system partition.
Both technologies have their benefits and drawbacks. The most important of these are listed here:
Sector Backup
Pros: Independent from a particular file system. May create archives of volumes with unknown file system, encrypted or hidden information. Creates the most complete and full snapshot of existing data on the partition. Excellent for operating system backup and rapid recovery.
Cons: Resulting large size of archives may contain redundant data. Difficult to manage the backup sets, especially when a small amount of data is being changed.
File Backup
Pros: Excellent for creating archives of small amounts of data, single files and/or folders. The backup task can be customized to include/exclude files based on type or by selected folders. Other criteria filters may also be utilized. Provides the possibility to backup data from the same volume with different backup policies. Easy to create and control backup sets.
Cons: Dependant upon the file system structure. Cannot create a full archive of an operating system. Much slower than sector backup when working with large amounts of data.
Sector-level backups in the form of a complete system backup image are typically a good starting point for protecting every machine on your network. Creating incremental file-level backup archives compliments the sector-level backups and helps to maintain the currency of the data and increases the likelihood of recovering all your data (with latest file changes or revisions) when you have a loss. Of course, just as backup to tape can be a manual and cumbersome process (hence the benefit of applying disk-based backup solutions), your solution should also automate the backup routines for servers and workstations and provide remote access to manage backup tasks on the server and attached, protected workstations.
For the heavy lifting, your solution should also be able to restore a server from a bare-metal state or restore to completely different hardware (even to a virtual machine) in case of hardware malfunction or when you decide to swap out and upgrade your hardware.
Partitioning as a
When it comes to optimizing existing storage space on servers and workstations, businesses can benefit from the vast tool set of a partitioning utility. Designed to re-configure, upgrade and deploy servers & workstations with minimal downtime, your chosen solution should include basic and advanced partition management tools, backup and restore tools, rescue and recovery tools, and cloning tools. These hard drive manipulation technologies help to maximize the usefulness of the hardware, both in terms of performance (i.e. defrag functions and boot corrector functions), and optimizes the overall space (i.e. resize, move, copy, merge, undelete partitions). Other common functions include: changing partition properties such as hide/unhide, make active/inactive, assign/remove drive letter, change volume label, convert file system, etc. You should also look at the capability of setting up unattended operations support with scripting to create custom unattended jobs for re-partitioning and re-deployment across all machines on your network. Your chosen solution should also allow you to quickly browse across multiple file system types such as FAT, FAT32, NTFS, Ext2 or Ext3 partitions. Advanced partitioning tools can help overcome the limitations of arranging and optimizing data on a hard drive. One such example is the ability to redistribute free space between partitions. One can increase the size of a volume by taking free space from other volumes or using unallocated disk space.
Summary
When maintaining your hardware and putting policies in place to protect your systems, you should consider disk-based backup/recovery software as the most flexible, reliable, and affordable option for networks of any size. Couple that functionality with hard disk drive partitioning utilities for ease of management and overall performance and you’re set with a complete data storage lifecycle management solution.
Incremental, Differential and Full Backup
A full sector-based backup image includes all contents of a partition or a hard disk at the moment of its creation. If you roll back your system to the initial state on a regular basis, that’s exactly what you’re looking for. A full file-based archive only contains files and folders. It is extremely efficient when backing up an e-mail database or particular documents, as no redundant data is processed. But if you care about maintaining a file history, you will benefit from one of the supplementary techniques called Incremental or Differential File Backup.
An incremental archive contains file data that has changed since the time of creating a full or incremental file-based archive. An incremental archive is smaller in size and takes less time to create than a full archive. When restoring incremental archives you will require the initial full archive and all of its previously created incremental archives, as shown in the example below.
A differential archive only contains data which changed since the time of creating a full archive, which forms a base image. This considerably saves your system resources. To restore this kind of backup you will require a full image and any one of its related differential archives, depending on the point in time you would like to restore to. As you can see by the image below, this is also very convenient.
Don Lewis is director of marketing at Paragon Software.
