Three hundred hours of waiting for a restore?

Most businesses and organizations know and do it: back up regularly and keep it off-site. A backup can contain a large amount of data, and the question is how quickly you will be up and running again in the event of a disaster. Suppose you have about 8 terabytes of data at your remote location, and you want to retrieve it with a high-speed Internet connection. But speed is relative. With the fastest connections (1 gigabit per second) used by businesses and organizations, it takes as much as thirty hours to transfer 8 terabytes. A backup in the cloud, with a connection of 100 mbit per second, takes 300 hours to retrieve. Almost two weeks.

Keeping Transportable

So good idea to keep a remote backup transportable. Make sure you can easily bring that 8 terabytes to your restore location by easily having a physical backup. Depending on the backup environment, you can reestablish the system yourself from the backup. Back in the air within two hours, instead of the previously calculated 300. If you do a remote backup, look at the data quantity and how to get it back to the restore location quickly. That restoring should be completely automatic and easy: if it’s good, you don’t do it daily and therefore the routine is lacking.

Copy of the backup

Therefore, especially with large amounts of data, we prefer to do a physical transport of data rather than a data transfer over an Internet connection. Important, then, is easy replication of your backup. Suppose the system is down and you need to retrieve the backup at the remote location. If something happens to the backup along the way, Leiden is really in trouble. Better to make a quick copy and leave the actual backup at the remote location. Then such a copy must be quick and easy to make.

In our next blog, we would like to tell you more about proper and smart backup and restore.