Backup technology is one of the areas of IT infrastructure that has seen some of the biggest changes in the last 5 years. Tape backup has long been the standard in the industry for maintaining point-in-time snapshot backups. This method has been almost completely replaced by disk-to-NAS backups.
Disk-to-NAS backups have many advantages over the older traditional tape backup. NAS devices are much faster than tape drives, the total time to run a backup has significantly decreased, allowing for more frequent incremental backups without affecting end-users. The more often an incremental backup is run, the smaller the effective data loss would be in the event that data needs to be restored from backup. For example, if incremental backups are run at 8:00am and 1:00pm, then a failure at 4:00pm only has 3 hours of data changes that would be lost if the 1:00pm backup had to be restored. As was normal with tape backups, typically the data would have to be restored from the previous night’s backup, producing a much larger period of data changes that would be lost if a restore was necessary. Restore speed is also significantly faster from Disk-to-NAS backups making the whole process much simpler and easier to perform.
