Many companies in need of IT services in Southern California realize that data security is unattainable without backup. Backing up your company’s data is not only important for effective data management, but it’s also a recovery option when a disaster overwhelms your IT infrastructure. Although data backup has commonly been used to refer to the process of making duplicate copies of data files, it is quite a complex practice integral to data protection. While the techniques of data backup have drastically evolved over the years, the complexity and cost of modern methods are hard to implement with a limited budget and an in-house team of IT professionals.
Capturing Data for Backup
Companies offering IT services in Southern California use sophisticated methods to capture data either in real-time or nearly real-time replication of data to realize continuous data protection. While traditional data backup methods capture data changes in predetermined intervals, they’re not your best option for a comprehensive backup plan. A systematic data backup plan involves duplicating all forms of data in your IT system including simple data files, metadata files, software application files, and system configuration data. Technically, you have two methods of capturing data for backup:
- File backup
- Image backup
While both methods are practical options, the image backup method is superior because it also captures system metadata files. File backup is quite a time-consuming and resource-intensive method of capturing data. It comes with excessive overheard since the system has to go through the following steps to create a copy of every file:
- Locate the blocks where folders are held
- Read the contents of the folders
- Identify specific filenames
- Read and duplicate the blocks
In contrast, when you sign up for IT services, your chosen service provider will set you up for an optimized data capture process using image backups. It will serve your business well, since you will overcome contention of hardware and software resources and reduce backup time.
How to Store Your Backup Data Safely
With an image backup, you don’t have to worry about missing files since this method bypasses the overhead of file look-up commonplace in file backups. Instead, it relies on copying blocks to backup system data end to end with a complete record of all files on the system disks. Image backup is designed with the ability to identify and read data files in such a way that you’ll only make copies of the specific files that have been modified since the last backup. With image backup, you can efficiently identify individual files and execute accurate file recovery. In addition, you will enjoy the flexibility of inspecting the image to ensure the integrity of your backup copy.
Overall, both file backups and image backups can take the form of full, differential, or incremental backup which you can deploy depending on your IT needs. Your backup policy can run on either scope— whatever your desire.
At ecasys, we offer reliable backup solutions as part of our IT services in Southern California to improve business productivity. Call us today to learn more about our IT services.
