Why Should You Care How Your Backups Work?
Come and experience the industry’s only chain-free image-based backup solution. Axcient x360Recover is a backup and disaster recovery service that captures snapshots of a server every few minutes, including its data, operating system, applications, and configurations, and replicates those images to the Axcient Cloud. Businesses that deploy x360Recover have local BDR appliance and cloud recovery options in the event of a server failure or site-wide disaster, using the Axcient Cloud.
Legacy Chain Pain Points That Never End
Regardless of the direction of the chain, chain-based backups are considered ‘legacy’ at this point because the infrastructure is risky, problematic, and puts BCDR in jeopardy. As most businesses now accept, data loss will occur. It’s no longer a question of if but when a data breach will happen, and that’s when backups are critical to business survival. It’s these challenges that have MSPs breaking the chains of backup:
- Storage Bloat: Even consolidated data cannot be deleted unless a specific deletion policy is created and maintained. Due to the needed consolidation functions to keep the quantity of links (points of failure) in your backup down to a minimum, it is also doubling your storage footprint for the time prior to your retention policies trim your backup data. This storage bloat requires MSPs to accurately forecast each client’s proper hardware stack and storage space to avoid surprise overages and fees.
- Compliance: Many industry-specific standards require multi-year retention, but chain-based technology should never be used without maintenance past 12 to 24 months and requires yearly reseeding. This discrepancy in retention standards and data chain integrity can hurt an MSPs ability to remain competitive in the channel.
- Recovery Speed: When disaster strikes and you need your backup data, you have to consolidate the base image to the time and data you want to restore, and then restore the data from an accessible ‘now-readable’ file. This process is long and resource-heavy, which puts unnecessary downtime on your client’s business, especially when virtualizing cloud data.
Why Chain-Free Backup is Awesome
To put it incredibly simply, chain-free backup is a modern solution that eliminates the pain points of chains. Chain-free backup starts off the same way as chain-based. You still do your first full backup, and you still do incremental backups, but that’s where things change. With chain-free, data is stored in a native virtualizable state with a pointer array algorithm. This means that each recovery point is independent.
Now, when corruption or malware occurs, bad data blocks are isolated and can be independently deleted without any risk of breaking any kind of data integrity in your backup dataset. Previous backups can still be recovered almost instantaneously, with new incremental backups being taken. There is no data loss and no wasting time or storage having to start new chains or reseed. Axcient’s technology even alerts you if storage corruption occurs so you can fix it before it becomes a problem.
- Pooled Storage for a Flat Fee: Now that storage or data bloat is never a problem – because there isn’t any duplicated backup data being created – there’s no risk of surprise overages, large storage space requirements, or ‘just in case’ storage. There is rarely need for a vendor to limit your storage with a chain-free solution. (For most use cases)
- Secure, Long-term Retention: Easily meet multi-year compliance standards and shorten recovery time with always-available backup data. Because the points of failure don’t increase with each backup, since there are no dependencies to break, each backup is entirely independent, forwards, backwards, upwards, sideways, and any other direction.
- Near-Instant Recovery: No chains means no base image requirements for restore, no consolidation, and no staging space. This significantly reduces the complexity of recovery to keep clients’ businesses running with uninterrupted business continuity.
Your data is how you run your business, make sure you’re using the right technology when recovery counts. Come experience Axcient x360Recover, the industry’s only chain-free image-based backup solution for FREE for 14 days.
More Great Stuff From Our Blog:
Check out some other interesting pieces from our blog: We talked with Jason Phelps from Huntress Labs about planning for the next ransomware attack, our CEO David Bennett explains why the current cybersecurity landscape means traditional backup is dead, or learn how you can ditch pricey on-site appliances with Local Cache for Direct-to-Cloud BCDR.
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