Should Windows backup be migrated to the cloud platform?

As a Windows system administrator, you should know how important it is to recover data after an unexpected system failure. But have you considered a cloud-based backup solution? This may seem as simple as the previous question, but in fact it does require you to think about it.

Windows can be backed up to the cloud platform via software or a generic plugin. The biggest benefit of cloud-based backup is that it's easy to back up data to a different location. In this way, if your data center is destroyed by fire, hurricane, nuclear explosion or other reasons, your data will not be lost because there are already backups in other physical locations.

Using the cloud also simplifies your backups. For example, if you use a third-party backup service, you may never have to worry about things like tape change or tape drive maintenance.

Cloud Weaknesses

Let's talk about the benefits of cloud-based backup. Let's consider a few negative effects. One of the biggest concerns is the time it takes to recover data in the event of a failure. For example, my main file server now has 400GB of data. If I lose this file server and have to restore all of this data over the Internet, this recovery process can take a week to complete because my Internet bandwidth is small.

Even if your Internet bandwidth is bigger than mine, it is important to remember that some Internet service providers will make some restrictions on the line, and automatically slow down or stop the service when they find a large amount of data transmission. This has been implemented. it's been a while. Believe me, once disaster recovery is needed, there is no time to study these service restrictions.

Another potential drawback is that cloud backup will isolate your data from the company. In this way, you must rely on your Internet connection to access your backup data at the remote end. Internet services are often unusable when major natural disasters such as hurricanes occur, and in this case the terminal's services are more difficult to recover.

A few weeks ago, my network was hit by a lightning strike (already many times). I will not say more about the specific disaster situation. I will talk about the destruction of my DNS server. I confirm that you must strongly agree with this view that the DNS server is very important to the WINDOWS environment because Active Directory must depend on it to run. Similarly, the DNS server also provides domain name resolution for Internet access requests. In short, fortunately, my backups are done locally, because even if my Internet device is available, my Internet connection will not work when the DNS service fails. Of course, in this case, I can only temporarily configure my server to use an external DNS to access the external network.

Cloud-based backup has a lot of tools to choose from, and my advice is to use them as a complementary backup mechanism to protect your data - not just the only backup solution. This way, you will always have a data backup in a different location, but if you are experiencing a situation where you need to do major data recovery, you don't need to solve the Internet bandwidth problem unless your local backup settings are broken.

In some cases, you can even run these restores in parallel. For example, while recovering a file server data from a local backup tape, you can recover some small applications such as DHCP from a remote cloud backup. Using multiple simultaneous restores can help you recover from disasters faster than relying on a separate backup mechanism.

Migrate your backup to the cloud

Well, obviously cloud-based backup still has its value, but you might be wondering how to create such a backup. The easiest way to deploy cloud backup is to give it to a third-party service provider. Of course, this is not necessarily the case.

Some organizations have begun deploying private clouds with windows azure. The problem is that most backup applications have these problems: A) not fully supporting cloud storage, B) cloud connectivity is difficult. I recently discovered that a company called Gladinet has launched a product that allows cloud storage to be mapped to a virtual disk in order to link a client or web server to the cloud. In addition, Gladinet also provides a natural connection to the Azure Blob Storage.

Again, although the technology for using the cloud as the preferred backup solution has matured, my recommendation is to continue to use the local backup solution plus cloud backup as a supplement. While cloud storage seems to be more stable and reliable, there are still a lot of troubles when you need to do large-scale data recovery from cloud backup.