Backup Consistency - A Game of Challenges

Backup consistency and how to automate the backup validation criteria is a game of challenges in modern data centers. With large data centers and the huge amount of production data that exists on most modern business applications, a major pain point is: will data be easily recovered? Will it be the exact thing pushed to the backup system? Typically, to test and verify their backups, customers build long procedures to restore and ensure the production backup sets are always useable and consistent. While this process does the job, it requires large investments and a good amount of time. Plus, it may not always meet the accuracy level desired.

In this Knowledge Sharing article, Mohamed Sohail, Emanuela Caramagna, Sameh Gad, and Denis Canty suggest that traditional techniques of Data Protection status reporting should include some automation for backup consistency checking (and possibly verification as well). The backup system dashboard should be able to show information (backup time, recovery time options, age, etc.), controls (i.e. start backup consistency checking), and recommendations (based on backup meta-data such as the change percentage in backup objects). Those controls may enable launching a series of recovery and verification scripts for each of the protected information assets.

The backup consistency checking mechanism proposed in the article includes a basic set of scripted steps that would automate data recovery to a virtualized host system (in cases where virtualization is available) succeeded by a suitable data verification tool (such as hash checking) on the recovered data. The benefits of this approach include:

• Minimizing data loss risks

• Minimizing used spaces and maximizing backup performance

• Reducing CapEx/OpEx due to optimization of the full backup process

Read the full article.