StorageBlog101

A synthetic backup does something that can seem almost counterintuitive: it produces a full backup without reading all of the organization's source data. Understanding how this works demystifies the synthetic backup and shows why it can be so much more efficient than a traditional full. Understanding how a synthetic backup builds a full without reading all your data again is how an organization grasps the mechanism behind the efficiency, recognizing that the synthetic backup assembles a full from existing backups rather than reading the live data, so the organization understands not just that synthetic backups are efficient but why, which helps it use them well and trust the full backups they produce, grasping the mechanism rather than treating the synthetic backup as a black box that somehow produces a full without the work a traditional full requires. The Starting Point: An Existing Full A synthetic backup starts from an existing full backup already taken, which captured all the ...

Traditional backup schedules often revolve around a periodic full backup, frequently run on weekends because a full backup reads and copies all the data and can take a long time and heavy resources. The synthetic full backup offers a way to have a full backup without running that heavy traditional full, which can mean the end of the weekend full that many organizations have long scheduled around. Understanding the synthetic full backup and the end of the weekend full is how an organization sees a way to maintain the benefit of regular full backups without the burden of running them traditionally, recognizing that a synthetic full produces a full backup by a different means, so the organization can keep the advantages of having current full backups without the heavy, time-consuming traditional full that drove the weekend schedule many organizations have worked around for years. Why the Traditional Full Is Heavy A traditional full backup reads and copies all the data, which takes signifi...

For some organizations, the thing that matters most about backups is how fast they restore. When restore speed is the priority, the comparison between differential and incremental backup takes on a particular shape, because the two approaches differ most consequentially in what a restore requires, and that difference directly affects restore speed. Understanding differential vs incremental backup when restore speed is what you care about is how an organization whose priority is fast recovery chooses the approach that serves that priority, recognizing that the two differ in how many backups a restore must combine, so the organization focused on restore speed can choose the approach that restores faster rather than choosing on backup-side considerations that matter less to it than getting its data back quickly when it needs to. Why Restore Speed Differs Between the Two Restore speed differs because a differential restore combines only the last full and the latest differential, while an i...

When comparing cloud disaster recovery services, it is easy to compare features and promises on paper. But the truest comparison is on what happens during a real failover, the actual event of recovering operations in the cloud when a disaster strikes, because that is when a service either delivers or does not. Comparing services on how they perform during a failover reveals which genuinely protects the organization. Understanding how to compare cloud disaster recovery services on what happens during a real failover is how an organization evaluates them on what matters most, their actual performance when recovery is needed, rather than on paper features, so the organization chooses a service that performs when a disaster strikes rather than one that looked good in comparison but falters during the failover that is the moment the service exists to handle. How Fast the Failover Completes A central comparison is how fast each service completes a failover, bringing operations up in the clou...

Many disasters share a common effect: they make an organization's primary site unreachable. A fire, a flood, a prolonged power or network outage, or physical damage can render the site where an organization's systems live inaccessible, taking its operations down with it. Cloud disaster recovery answers this by placing the organization's recovery capability somewhere the disaster cannot reach, in the cloud, so the organization can recover even when its own site cannot be reached. Understanding cloud disaster recovery as the answer to a site you can no longer reach is how an organization sees why recovering in the cloud matters, recognizing that a recovery capability located at the same site as the systems it protects fails when that site is unreachable, so placing recovery in the cloud, beyond the reach of a local disaster, is what lets the organization recover when its primary site cannot be reached at all. The Problem of a Shared Fate Recovery capability located at the sam...

When an organization engages a cloud-based disaster recovery service, the headline promise, that it can recover after a disaster, is only part of the picture. The details, the fine print, determine what the service actually provides, how fast it recovers, what it covers, and what the organization remains responsible for. Reading the fine print carefully is how an organization knows what it is actually getting rather than what it assumes. Understanding how to read the fine print of a cloud-based disaster recovery service is how an organization ensures the service it engages genuinely meets its needs, looking past the headline promise to the details that determine what the service actually delivers, so the organization is not surprised during a disaster to find the service provides less, or demands more of it, than it assumed from the headline promise the service was marketed on. The Recovery Time Commitment The fine print should state the recovery time the service commits to, so the org...