How To Restore Novabackup Blog

Dealing With Tight Restore Windows

by Sean Curiel, on Oct 22, 2019 2:05:40 PM

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How fast a backup restore takes place depends on a long list of factors. Let's assume that we understand all the bottlenecks within our environment.  In addition to backup size, the speed of storage devices, and current network traffic – the efficiency of the Backup & Restore software is also critical. Specific features within the backup solution can directly affect an organization's access to data in the event of a data loss scenario.

With every minute that passes when data is unavailable resulting in exponential financial loss, it's important to understand the specific features within your backup solution that affect your backup window.

Backup Types Affect Restore

Building a backup strategy that utilizes backup types such as incremental and differential backups have a direct impact on the backup's restore speed. The software must be flexible enough to offer the client a wide range of options. But the backups types and schedule must be matched with the organizations specific data use to guarantee that the strategy improves rather than delays restore times. (Download our Backup Strategy Guide)

Backup Architecture As A Speed Factor

Backup solutions with a distributed system architecture and high-performance data movers, like NovaStor DataCenter, optimize the interaction between the restore process and hardware to achieve a noticeable acceleration when large amounts of data are involved. The distributed system architecture ensures low network load, balanced workloads between devices, high data throughput and stability. Streamlined media management allows for quick identification of the memory required for the restore.

Multi-streaming

How many streams of data can your backup software at once? It's a legitimate question. By dividing the backup data into several parallel data streams, multistreaming functionality is able to reach the maximum write/restore speed and the maximum read speed of the storage technologies used. As a pure software function, multistreaming offers cost-free acceleration of backup and restore. How does multistreaming work? Learn more about the topic in our whitepaper.

Deduplication

Solutions that are optimized for use with deduplication technologies (such as those in Windows Server), reduce the amount of duplicate information stored, affecting drive space and network traffic. While software that performs dedupe processing inline can negatively affect backup performance, post-processing deduplication (asynchronous) deduplication removes the redundant data after backups have completed.

Compression

Using built-in compression options can result in reduced backup size, transfer rates and load on your network traffic. But compression comes in different forms and can be performed at different stages in the backup process, meaning that it also has the potential to slow systems down. Consultation with a backup expert on your unique environment will help determine whether compression makes sense in your backup scenario.

People Matter

NovaStor provides software, service, and support to help you achieve your backup and restore goals. Having the right people on-hand with an exclusive focus on data-protection, can make all the difference when I comes to meeting your backup window restrictions. Services including backup strategy consultation, restore tests and ongoing backup health checks ensure that you make the best use your backup solution from day-to-day business to disaster situations. Speak to a NovaStor backup expert today about your environment.