Enterprise Laptop Desktop Backup – Restartability!
Posted by Puneesh Chaudhry on Thu, Jun 10, 2010 @ 08:13 AM
This post is part of a Series on planning for Enterprise desktop laptop backup in your organization. Whether you are considering software or online options for your enterprise PC backup solution there are several items that need to be considered and this series takes a look at those items. In my last post, I explored the crucial issue that plagues almost every solution: aggressive backup agents that adversely impact the user and what to look for to avoid that. In this post, I'll explore the key requirement of restartability.
A PC, especially the laptop is perhaps the most volatile environment in the entire IT infrastructure. Unlike a server, a desktop laptop can power down or lose connectivity at any time, or the end user can kill any Software agent that may be running on the PC - c'mon admit it - we've all done that! Any of this can happen during backup on a single PC. Now multiply it by hundreds or thousands and imagine it happening every day! It becomes pretty clear that it is extremely important for an enterprise desktop laptop backup solution to have restartability, i.e. the ability to:
- Gracefully handle severe failures: For a PC backup solution any of the above failures are expected, not out of the norm and hence should be handled gracefully and automatically without requiring administrator or end user action. I liken it to continuing your tap dance without missing a beat even though the rug has been pulled out from under your feet!
- Automatically restart: If a backup process is interrupted, it should automatically restart when the conditions permit for that to happen again. For example, if the backup was interrupted because the network connectivity was lost, the backup process should be watching for the connectivity to come back so it can automatically resume backup when the connectivity is back and it is appropriate to perform the backup (i.e. the user is not using the PC).
- Resume at the point of the last stoppage: If you were backing up a 100MB file and the backup was interrupted when you had already backed up 90MB, the backup process should resume at the point of stoppage by only backing up and sending the remaining 10MB of data. This is especially important when the backup is happening over a WAN.
The ability to restart a backup exactly where it stopped is extremely crucial for an enterprise class desktop laptop backup solution, because on a PC the environmental errors are so much more frequent than a server. Many a times there is a temptation to use the same product that does backup of your servers for backing up your enterprise PC population also. Just, make sure that any solution you look at can automatically handle the multitude of environmental errors you'll have to deal with on a daily basis for your enterprise laptop desktop population.