When It Comes to Speedy Restores, Granular Data Recovery Matters

Backups and backup speeds providing maximum throughput are wonderful, however, a backup is only as good as your ability to recover data from it. And when a recovery event occurs, backup admins are typically in a time-bound pickle, where the speed of recovery is the only thing that matters. As a former backup admin myself, the phrase “How long till we’re back?” echoes in my ears. There’s definite pressure to perform and to do it quickly.

Backup admins need to take a pragmatic approach and be prepared to be flexible. Your backup and recovery solution should provide options to quickly search, identify and select the most granular data needed. Why? Because everyone wants a speedy recovery, and granularity can help achieve that!

Granularity matters when selecting your data protection solution

If you want to accelerate your data recovery, you need to make sure your backup and recovery solution offers granular recovery capabilities. How easily you can both locate and restore certain files? Are you stuck with restoring the entire VM from the cloud, for instance? How easily can you locate a specific file, especially if you don’t even know the file name, or when the data was lost?

Without a rich data index, trying to locate a particular file to restore without those specifics can be a near impossible task.  In real-life scenarios, IT admins need to be able to locate individual data across a wide range of variables such as date ranges, VMs or physical servers. They’ll need to search for filenames or folders that may or may not contain a certain word – rather than knowing the exact folder location and date the last known good version of the data was protected.  Having a such granularity — with added capabilities for backup admins to delegate tasks providing self-service to the people who know the environment best — will allow you to pinpoint and recover the smallest amount of data possible.  

All in all, when considering a cloud-based data protection solution, you need to ask some tough questions, and specifically ask about the granularity of the data you can recover—and how easy it is to locate very specific data when you don’t know how it went missing. 

Metallic backup and recovery solutions for Core, Endpoint, and Office 365 deliver granularity and complimentary self-service capabilities — enabling you or a colleague to locate the exact data needed speedily—and granularly restore it either across your local network or from the cloud. When minutes matter, you can’t afford to spend time searching for that needle in the haystack. Having the ability to locate the specific data when you don’t know the details of its disappearance will save you valuable time and lead to a faster recovery!