Pro tips for backing up large datasets

IT admins tasked with restoring servers or lost data during a disruption are consumed with a single-minded purpose: successful recovery. But it shouldn’t take an adverse event to underscore the importance of recovery as part of an overall backup strategy. This is especially true with large datasets. Before you consider how you’re going to back up large datasets, first consider how you may need to recover the data. Variables abound. Is it critical or non-critical data? A simple file deletion or a system-wide outage? A physical server running onsite or a virtual one hosted offsite? These and a handful of other criteria will determine your backup and disaster recovery (BDR) deployment. What do we mean by large? A simple question with a not-so-simple answer. If your total data footprint is 5 TB or more, that’s considered large. But what kind of data is it? How many actual files are there? How frequently do they change? How much can they be compressed?