Kamil Macniak, 123RF

Professional backup solutions compared

Test Run

Article from ADMIN 02/2010

By Jens-Christoph Brendel

Seven leading and popular backup solutions line up to face the Linux Technical Review test team, whose members have checked nearly 100 individual features in a comparative test.

You might think everything to be said about backups has already been said. The backup principle scribes have used since the middle ages has hardly changed. Valuable information is duplicated and put into safekeeping to avoid loss, even if the original is mislaid or damaged. Of course, the copying process is digital and typically automated now. The volume of data created worldwide will grow 10-fold between 2006 and 2011 say the analysts at IDC [1], and the major part of this huge volume – some 1,800 exabytes – needs to be backed up on a regular basis.

As capacities grow and time slots become increasingly shorter, admins face limited bandwidth for network-based data transfer. Additionally, they need to worry about data security and protection requirements, the increasing need for automation, huge mountains of information that cloud offerings or data warehouses accumulate, the pressure of guaranteeing minimal outages, stricter compliance regulations, and an increasingly complex storage landscape. For all of these reasons, and more, backup is a topic of concern for many admins.

New requirements automatically spawn new backup software features, and these changes are reflected in the product comparison, first performed about two years ago. Some of the buzzwords that dominate the backup scene today were of no consequence then, including the now ubiquitous "deduplication," as well as continuous data protection, synthetic backups, or special processes for backups of virtual machines. In the new round of product comparisons, I naturally included these criteria, and they are worth examining in more detail.