Enterprise Laptop Backup and Recovery – Forever Incremental
Posted by Puneesh Chaudhry on Fri, Jul 23, 2010 @ 12:48 PM
This post is part of a Series on planning for Enterprise desktop laptop backup in your organization. In my last post, I discussed why versioning capability is important when backing up PC data. In this post, I’ll discuss the need for forever incremental backup capability when backing up enterprise laptops and desktops.
Before, we get into why forever incremental backups are important for backing up desktops and laptops, let’s review the various backup types and their uses. This article on SearchDataBackup does a good job of describing the various backup types: full, incremental, differential, synthetic full and forever incremental. The reason there are multiple backup types is because different types of data have different characteristics in terms of data size, change rate and recovery requirements and one size doesn’t fit all. For example, if you are backing up an Exchange server, the recommended method is to do a weekly full backup and then do incremental or differential backups during the week. This allows for efficiency – i.e. not doing a full backup every day – yet provides recovery granularity because the transaction logs can be played back to get to pretty much any point in time. However, when it comes to backing up PCs, forever incremental backup with synthetic full capability is the best choice because of the following reasons:
- Bandwidth and backup window constraints: A full backup is perhaps the most intrusive task on any system. It requires that all the data on the system be read on the source system and then transmitted to and processed on the backup server. It requires a large amount of bandwidth and CPU horsepower. This is why, for servers, full backups often happen over the weekends, when the workload is low and the corporate network can spare the bandwidth. However, unlike for servers, doing a regular full backup of the PCs is not feasible because of the following reasons:
- PC may not be switched on during the weekend: Typically, PCs are not switched on during the weekend, or even if they are turned on, many of them, especially laptops, are not on the corporate network – thus making the full backup over the weekend impractical.
- Sheer number of the PCs in a company: In any corporate setting, PCs outnumber any other type of compute resource, usually by an order of magnitude. Imagine, 5,000 PCs doing a full backup every Friday afternoon (since weekend is not an option!): not only clogging the network, but also requiring that the server be able to ingest a large amount of data from a large number of end points.
- WAN bandwidth constraints: PCs, especially laptops tend to be quite distributed and often connect over the WAN. Due to the amount of data that needs to be moved in a full backup, it is impractical to perform regular full backups for laptop users who tend to be mobile.
- Impact to the PC: Given the intrusive nature of the full backup, the impact to the end user’s productivity is quite severe and is another reason why periodic full backups on the PC should be avoided.
It is clear from the constraints listed above that periodic full and incremental backups are not practical for the enterprise laptop and desktop backup scenario. The only reliable and efficient way of backing up your enterprise laptop and desktop population is to do forever incremental backups. Now, let’s look at the recovery side of the equation to see how to recover these forever incremental backups.
- Self-service recovery: Backups are only useful if they can be used for recovery. In case of PC data, a majority of the data recovery requests are for single files. Enabling your end users to perform self-service recovery of their data is not only useful for the end users, but is also a tremendous cost saver for IT as they don’t have to field helpdesk calls for data recovery. However, end user recovery requires that the recovery process be simple and 1 click. It is impractical to expect that the end users can perform multi-step recoveries like recover a full backup first and then apply multiple incremental backups. It is for this reason that it is imperative that for enterprise desktop laptop backup, forever incremental backups be combined with synthetic full backups so the end user always sees the entire data set available for recovery in one place and can recover any file they desire with a single click.