Category: Data Protection
Creating a Disaster Recovery Plan
“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” (Benjamin Franklin) A disaster may happen anytime and anywhere. It’s root causes may vary from a single drive array failure to infrastructure destruction in an entire geographic region. Its consequences can paralyze a single mission-critical server or make several data centers unavailable. In most cases you […]
Posted on July 12, 2017 by Alex Mayer
Differential Backup vs. Incremental Backup
In earlier posts, we have covered how the incremental backup works. Now we will focus on how the differential backup works and compare it with the incremental one. Differential backup copies the differences in a VM made since a last full backup. This method is in between a full backup and a traditional incremental (not […]
Posted on June 28, 2017 by Michael Bose
How to Backup VMs to Azure – Part 2
In the first post of this series on how to backup VMs to Microsoft Azure, we looked at using an Azure VM running the transporter service and then provisioning a remote repository. The second method to achieve offsite backups to Microsoft Azure uses the SMB protocol to copy our NAKIVO backups to an Azure file […]
Posted on June 19, 2017 by Brandon Lee
Exchange Log Truncation in VM Backups
One of the tremendous benefits to application-aware backups is being able to perform application-aware tasks such as truncating log files. Application-aware backups are able to flush any application specific data out of memory and pending I/O operations to disk so that backups are consistent from an application standpoint. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, we are […]
Posted on June 16, 2017 by Brandon Lee
How to Backup VMs to Azure – Part 1
One of the hard and fast requirements of today’s modern backup solutions is the ability to be able to push data to the cloud as an offsite backup option. Offsite backups are essential as they protect organizations from potential data loss when losing an entire site. With the 3-2-1 backup rule standard of 3 copies […]
Posted on June 14, 2017 by Brandon Lee
The Importance and How to Offsite Backup | Disaster Recovery Scenarios
When thinking about disaster recovery and protecting backup data, we always want to have more than one source of being able to restore our production systems. There is an industry suggested standard of the 3-2-1 rule that says we ideally have three copies of our data on two different mediums, and one offsite copy of […]
Posted on June 12, 2017 by Brandon Lee
VM Backup vs. VM Replication
VM backup and replication are essential parts of a data protection plan. At the first look, they seem similar and interchangeable, and this is partly true. VM backup and replication pursue different goals, so you need to think of them both when setting up a data protection plan and understand the difference between them. VM […]
Posted on June 9, 2017 by Michael Bose
RPO and RTO: What Is the Difference and Why You Should Care?
The ultimate goal of data protection is clear: you want to be sure that you will not lose data if something goes wrong. However, it is quite costly to mirror all the changes in your virtual environment to a DR site. That is why you need to accept the idea that you will lose some […]
Posted on June 7, 2017 by Michael Bose
GFS Retention Policy Explained
At first, let’s recap what retention policy is and why we need it. Ideally, the goal of backup is the ability to recover data from any point back in time. The straightforward way to do that is to keep periodical backups, usually daily. However, even with space-saving techniques like forever-incremental backups, synthetic backups, data compression, […]
Posted on June 2, 2017 by Michael Bose
How Does Forever-Incremental Backup Work on VMs?
The simplest way of backing up a VM is doing the full backup. You just need to copy an entire virtual machine to a backup repository. This simplicity has its price: making the full backup takes a long time, loads production networks, and uses a significant amount of space. One of the ways to reduce […]
Posted on May 29, 2017 by Michael Bose