Restoring Files VS Backup Software Restrictions
The backup software market of today offers an enormous number, which are capable of virtually every backup task possible. So, if one is interested in feeling safe about his data, there are more opportunities she can think of.
This easily leads to confusion and inability to choose what is right for you. The inaccessibility of several declared product features right from the box can make things even worse.
Backup Software Restrictions
Many backup vendors today sell products without most of the features and requires extra payment for making them available.
For example, many backup apps often work only with the mainstream platforms (Windows 7 or Vista) and don’t interact with the specific important ones (Windows SBS 2008). This makes them useless for the serious business.
Another issues is high user skills requirements. With some products there are situations when you must boot under another OS to create a disk image or you find yourself killing small processes manually.
One more problem is poor functionality for working with large data: most apps have restrictions for the number of files to copy during one backup session. In other words, the products were not optimized for working under high-pressure circumstances
But the major challenge is restoring files.
How to Make Sure Your Files Might be Restored
You get the program which is only backing the files up and for restoring them you have to buy something else from the same company. Thus, the first thing you better do while choosing and running a new backup app is to dig for data restore issues overview.
Specifically, restoring your data after computer crash can be much easier if safety measures during the backup were applied. Strict management of the backup process will reduce time and efforts required for data recovery. For smooth recovery one has to monitor and control key factors and keep history of data backups.
Testing Makes Life Easier
It is worth to practice backup and recovery procedures in test environment before the production starts. This is the only way to check reliability of the backup-recovery system and it is approved if all the links in the “backup – restore” chain work as assumed.
The Right Backup Choice (or No Rose Without a Thorn)
Complexity of modern solutions for data protection increases with time. New complex concepts such as snapshot-based backup, continuous backup systems, etc. are available now but deployment of such concepts may take several months and cost several hundred thousand dollars. Therefore, before deployment, pluses and minuses of new sophisticated concepts have to be carefully analyzed and compared with the previously existed solutions.
Hopefully, this short overview will help you keep the data protected. Good luck to all!