With the increasing amount of data that's building up in our databases, it's never been
more imperative to have the appropriate backup and recovery software in place. Any amount of downtime—whether it's because of user error or a power outage—can
be costly and even devastating to the ongoing success of a company. Although choosing
database backup and recovery software is crucial to your company and your clients, be
patient and think about your requirements. Many database backup and recovery software
solutions may look similar, but often there are differences that might sway you one way
or another. Let's look at some of the buying factors that you need to consider before
making a decision.
Database Platforms
Before making a buying decision, look
closely at the various database platforms
the solution provides support for. IT shops
are becoming more and more heterogeneous so it's important to ask questions
such as: "What databases do we support?
Do we plan to add additional database
platforms in the future?" Some solutions
in this buyer's guide support only SQL
Server, whereas others support SQL Server,
Oracle, MySQL, and/or IBM DB2. So, if
you think you might use an Oracle database down the road, think about purchasing
a solution that supports Oracle and your
current database platform.
Additional Application Support
If you're using SharePoint or Microsoft
Exchange Server, or plan to do so in the
future, see whether any of the backup
solutions support these applications. Sure,
this buyer's guide is about database backup
software, but this additional application
support may be helpful with regard to the
systems that you need to support.
Full, Incremental, or Differential
When you wade through the backup
options that the software features, you're
going to see the terms full backup, differential backup, and incremental backup. It's
important to know the differences in how
they work. Full backup is what it sounds
like. It copies all your data each time you
perform a backup. Although it sounds
good, it can severely affect backup times
and requires a lot of storage.
The last two backup options—incremental and differential—often are confused, and it's important to know there is
a difference. Differential backups will back
up all your data that has changed since the
last full backup, which can greatly reduce
restore time. Incremental backup will back
up the most recent backup, regardless of
whether that last backup was full, incremental, or differential. The main benefit
is that it reduces the backup window.
However, incremental backup will increase
restore times because you have to restore
the latest full backup, plus all incremental
backups since.
Recovery Time
Although recovery time isn't something
I could address in the buyer's guide table,
it's one of the most important factors that
you need to consider. Lets face it, at some
time or another your system will go down
and you'll need to recover data in a timely
matter to ensure that business operations
continue as usual. The difference between
a one-minute and three-minute recovery
could severely impact your organization.
So call the vendor, talk to an engineer, and
get an estimate of the recovery time for
your situation. The best option is to acquire
a demo of the product, and go through a
test scenario.
While on the topic, you should pay
close attention to the solutions that provide "point-in-time" or "point-of-failure"
recovery. These simple types of recovery
help bring your database to the latest state
that wasn't corrupted.
Online Backup
There's no doubt that backup windows are
shrinking, which is why the ability to perform online backups has never been more
important. Products that support online
backup let you continue using a database
24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Other Items Worth Mentioning
Some would say that bare-metal restore is
a must-have part of any backup and restore
solution. Bare-metal restore functionality
lets you take backup data and restore it
to a server that has no OS or software
installed.
If you're looking for other ways to
distinguish the products in the attached
table, look at whether or not the product
features continuous data protection (CDP).
This technology automatically saves a copy
of changed data, which lets you restore to
any point in time.
See Associated Buyers Guide
End of Article
