Imaged-Based Backup And Disaster Recovery: 4 Keys To Keeping It Simple

By Tom Fedro, President, Paragon Software Group Corp.                           

Few organizations can afford downtime at any level today. When things go wrong, there simply isn’t time to wait because, as we all know, time is money. While just about every business recognizes the need for backup and disaster recovery (BDR), many resellers are now finding that image-based backup offers an efficient and cost effective way to handle the task, especially for small and mid-sized organizations.

Image-based backup, also known as sector-based backup, works by rapidly copying every sector — or, to save time and storage space — only those sectors used. The resulting backup is an exact replica, or image. During the backup process, the disk is analyzed for changes to individual sectors, and nearly continuous, real-time incremental backups of the disk image can be performed. This way, in the event of data loss or a hardware failure, an up-to-date snapshot of the disk is always readily available to be restored.

With image-based backup, key selling points for resellers include performance improvements, scalability, and elimination of redundancy. When done right, these BDR solutions allow administrators to easily define multiple backup servers and storage targets and create multi-tiered backup policies, while reducing the overall amount of stored data.

Please log in or register below to read the full article.