Workstation Backup and Systems

Workstation backup has been practiced by most experienced computer users since the 1990s. The challenge with workstation backups is that data may need to be backed up while the user is working; hence, the backup tool needs to impact the system minimally, yet provide satisfying performance. In addition, another hurdle for backup software is that workstations are subject to frequent software installations and system configuration alterations.

Server administrators with extraordinary large amounts of information may want to look into the backup compression features of their backup software. Compression usually works well on applications, text, PDF, word documents, system files, and other documents with a small noise ratio. Music and video generally do not compress well due to the nature of the information stored within.

IT gurus who wish to get their hands on a good server backup software package may want to focus on the file backup capabilities of their product. While a Windows backup may be necessary, it is usually more important to back up files quickly and reliably. The recent growth of Server Core and other installations of limited GUI operating systems may make data recovery plans more complicated since most backup tools do not support such environments. Managers would therefore want to check on their backup tool before planning a data center rollout.

Backing up volumes is critical on workstations since users rarely deploy file backup software to protect their data. Usually disk imaging is applied on an entire physical hard disk, but it can technically be applied to separate partitions as well, such as a single drive letter. The advantage of drive imaging is that it creates an exact byte-level copy of the information, including hidden file system information, such as residues of deleted files.

Since the advent of virtual machines, virtual machine backup has gained more magnitude. In VMware, a backup of a virtual machine while running usually requires the VMDK file to be backed up. To back up VMDK files, however, one needs to either shut down the virtual machine, or the backup program needs to connect to VMware Server to get access to the live virtual disk file. In the latter case a specialized tool may be necessary.

A virtual machine backup script for VMware may suffice to run a virtual server backup against the virtual host but the results may be less than optimal without a specialized software package. By making a copy of all virtual machines, the administrator may be able to provide some disaster prevention; however, if many virtual machines or very large ones need to be backed up, each virtual server copy may take too long to complete and use too much storage.

Experts and fans of Microsoft Virtual PC, such as software testers and developers, also require a reliable method to backup Virtual PC machines. Similarly, those who are fans of VirtualBox are also in need for automatic VirtualBox backup software. As with all virtual machine backups, the ideal solution should do the backup automatically and in the background.

A simple way to save storage space is to generate an incremental backup. Incremental backups always refer to the state of the last backup cycle and extract the difference between the two cycles. The downside of incremental backup is that each incremental step needs to be restored as well during the recovery process; hence, incremental recoveries take longer than that of differential backups.

The diminishing cost of Internet hosting and bandwidth has made FTP backup a feasible alternative to on-site backup. While FTP is supported by several backup products, specialized FTP backup software may be necessary for power users who work with a variety of files, such as international file names and files larger than 4 GB. FTP backups are probably not suited as general backup strategies because the cost per GB is still relatively high compared to that of USB and external hard drives.

About the Author

Melissa is a writer for Hyper-V backup software, cluster shared volume, and general backup software.

Author (sweetmaid). Submitted on Thu, 3 Mar 2011 Time: 4:53 PM

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