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Celebrating 25 Years

To each his own storage

Checklist: Backup software

By Drew Robb, Special to GCN

● How much data do you currently have to back up? What is the data growth rate?

● What types of data need to be backed up?

● What are the recovery-point and recovery-time objectives for each type of data?

● What storage architectures does the backup software support — tape, virtual tape libraries, disk to disk?

● What level of data deduplication does the software offer? Is the deduplication being done with online or near-line storage?

● How is it priced? Flat rate? Per device? Per terabyte?

● Do you need additional technologies, such as snapshots or replication? How does the backup software integrate with these?

● What type of encryption does the software provide?

● What services does the vendor offer for installation and support?

● How are the backups managed? Can a single instance support multiple data domains with separate administrators?

● How many locations do you need to back up? Do you need to back up from workstations or laptop PCs?

● Will this backup solution require additional hardware?


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