The cloud backup market has become saturated with hundreds of companies all claiming that they can back up your data efficiently and securely to the cloud. Part of this may be true but the level of solution that is utilised can significantly affect how quickly data can be restored.
One common misconception and concern that many people have who are reluctant to move to a cloud backup solution is that it will take a very long time to restore data.
The quality of solution utilised can have a massive impact on how quickly data can be restored. There are cheaper cloud backup solutions available where data is sent to and held on hardware in a location where the provider has no access or control. As a result, the provider has no influence over the hardware that data is kept on and doesn’t have the ability to copy data onto a portable device if required to do so. As a result, all the data to be restored has to be downloaded to the customer site. Naturally, this can take some time if multiple TBs of data are needed to be restored and if the available download speeds aren’t particularly very good.
In order to mitigate such problems, there are solutions that offer a variety of options to help keep restore times down to a minimum. One option is a local storage feature. This is where the last generation of each file is kept locally onsite. This helps drastically with restore speeds as data will be restored at LAN speed rather than WAN speeds. If this feature was utilised but a restore was required of older generations of data rather than the latest or if there was a disaster at the site and the local hardware was damaged, there is an alternate option.
The alternate option is to request a disk tape. This is where the required data is copied onto a portable device and then transport it to the required destination. The data is then restored at LAN speeds so where restoring over the WAN may have taken several weeks, utilising this feature can drastically reduce the restore time to a number of days.
It is a common misconception that restores will take much longer if a cloud backup solution is utilised. The better solutions in the market offer features that drastically help reduce restore times and can prove to restore data more quickly than other backup methods such as tape. Having the options to utilise local storage can help significantly and is further enhanced with the option to request a disk tape.
Can you restore your data quickly and efficiently? Are you concerned with how long it will take you to restore your data?
