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As data growth spirals, getting a handle on your backup and recovery processes becomes even more crucial. Without a proper strategy in place for maintaining and securing stored data, and for reproducing data on demand, you could lose business or incur huge legal penalties. Here are seven things you can do to make your storage environment easier to back up and restore.
- Don't use one tool for everything.
The best tool for backing up file servers isn't necessarily the best tool for archiving email, for example. Likewise, SAN-based replication doesn't get too expensive unless you're trying to use it for everything. Take a realistic look at the backup requirements for each of your projects--whether it's disaster recovery/business continuity, data archiving for compliance or legal discovery--and use the most appropriate tools for that particular area.
- Standardize on a few good tools.
Find and use the tools that work well for your environment and make sure that the versions you use are consistent across all of your data silos and backup servers. Standardizing on hardware can also pay dividends, whether you're standardizing host bus adapters for SAN connectivity or tape drives. Having many different brands and types of tape drives with dozens of types and capacities of tape cartridges isn't uncommon, but it introduces one of the greatest sources of complexity in backup strategies.
- Standardize directory structures on file servers.
This goes beyond putting user directories in the same place on file servers. Standardize and document database installations, Web servers, mail servers and so on. This makes it much easier to ensure that all critical data is backed up regularly without having to do daily full backups of the whole server drive.
- Consider disk-to-disk (D2D) backups.
D2D doesn't just provide faster backups and restores; it lets you consolidate multiple backup servers onto one storage system, which can then be more easily managed. Disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) allows for offsite archiving; you can also replicate your backup store to a remote site depending on your requirements for long-term archiving.
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