Endpoint Protection

Myth 4:  Granular Level Recovery Takes Too Long  

 

In Myth #2 we talked about granular recovery as a main driver for implementing disk into the backup infrastructure and a good way to help IT meet today’s RPOs and RTOs. As I mentioned, granular level recovery is one technology that enables IT to meet those RTOs and RPOs. However, I didn’t talk about some of the perceived challenges of granular level recovery, so I’d like to debunk the myth that it takes too long to restore data at this level.

Advanced granular recovery technology enables businesses to quickly restore individual emails, files, or documents from one backup pass, saving significant time and money.  Up until now, backup and recovery procedures have been arduous, requiring multiple agents and multiple backups. For example, here is what might be required on an Exchange server:

•    Full database backup – so a full recovery of the Exchange server could be performed if needed.
•    Granular recovery of Exchange – via a mailbox, or “brick-level” backup. MAPI technology means this backup can take up to four times longer than a whole database backup.
•    Incremental backups of the database and mailbox each night.

 

The problem with this scenario? Multiple backups lead to massive storage and time consumption, which can be a nightmare to manage. And, let’s not forget the unpleasant mechanics of traditional message-level recovery for points one and three above if mailbox-level backups are too painful to implement, forcing the need to recover to a recovery storage group first. This is a gross inefficiency of time spent and storage consumed.

Here’s another scenario that illustrates the shortcomings of some of the traditional backup and recovery procedures: let’s say need to quickly produce (within 24 hours) an email that was sent last week. Your recovery solution may have the data, but there is no way you can meet your recovery deadline. With granular recovery technology, it is much easier than it sounds. It is not difficult to implement and it provides an easy approach for quick recovery. Administrators have quick and random access to backups performed to a disk. For example, an Exchange administrator can browse a backup set just like browsing Exchange and select the items to restore–even down to the individual email.

Check back for here for the last two blogs in our series debunking common data protection myths.