Online Backup

It’s all about Recovery

Over the last decade, companies have become very conscious of protecting their data and ensuring it is backed up correctly. Practically every company has some form of backup and most companies are very good at ensuring that their data is backed up every night to either a tape drive or offsite using Online Backup.

This is all great news but what we need to focus on now is how to improve that process and make it more efficient and reliable. It seems obvious that the most important aspect of data backup is the ability to restore the data in the event of a disaster. However, very few companies perform regular data restoration testing and therefore, do not know for sure if the data that they are so carefully backing up every night is actually recoverable.

In the case of tape backups, it can be very time consuming and difficult to restore data so carrying out tests is not performed very often. However, with Online Backup, it is much easier to test a restore and ensure that the data is recoverable. When carrying out a test restore, it is advisable to not just restore one or two files but actually try to restore a database or large folder of information, this way you get to really test the restorability of the software.

Savenet Solutions use Asigra software to provide our Online Backup service and over the last 20 years, Asigra has developed best practices around data management to ensure data restorability if the customer looses a file, disk, machine or the entire facility.

We chose the Asigra solution for this very reason as for us the reliability of restoring customer data and entire servers was critical.
The data has to be checked constantly to ensure restorability. The following factors can cause data corruption:

1. Disc malfunction
2. Disc controller malfunction
3. Bad sectors on the disc
4. File system corruption

Access to metadata is not sufficient because bad sector on a disc can render metadata unreadable.

What makes Asigra different from its Competitors?
Asigra’s ability to consistently restore data of any size or volume is what differentiates it from other Online Backup companies.

How does it ensure Restorability?
Following data integrity and consistency check functionality is embedded in Asigra software to ensure, data restorability:

1. Ensuring data consistency – this process ensures that all the data components have been collected sequentially by the DS-Client (the data collector at the enterprise customer’s premises) before sending the data to the DS-System.

2. Ensuring all data has arrived offsite before storage – Asigra’s DS-System (the online data repository) writes all the data being backed up offsite to a temporary location, checks and ensures that all the data has arrived before storing it.

3. Restore validation – this is an actual restore simulation that conducts an actual data restore to a temporary location to ensure data restorability. Think of it as the data restore dry run to prepare for the actual disaster.

4. Autonomic healing – this automated process runs on the DS-System in the background, scans the entire storage to ensure data integrity. Since the data at the DS-System is encrypted, the “Autonomic Healing“ process checks links between the data blocks, compares digital signatures between different components for inconsistencies. When corrupted data is uncovered, it is marked as corrupted and a notification is sent to the DS-Client to resend the portion of that data that was marked corrupted. This ensures that the data is always recoverable in case of a disaster.

5. Backing up the DS-Client database to the DS-System – this ensures that if the DS-Client is lost it can easily be rebuilt with the appropriate backup structure.

When you're shopping for a backup solution, please inquire from your vendor to ensure that the functionality they provide will restore your data, not just during a Disaster Recovery (DR) drill but in the event of an actual disaster (accidently deleted file, damaged hard drive, machine loss or lost site).

Savenet Solutions chose Asigra software because of it’s reliability and restorability, which makes it the World’s Number 1 Online Backup software.