What is the impact of unstructured data on backup and restore and disaster recovery in general?
As data volumes grow, there's a bigger problem meeting recovery time objectives. We depend on our data, and we have set recovery times for our systems that are zero (no downtime) in some cases, though most companies set recovery times from eight to 24 hours...
Remember that backups also tend to multiply the volume of data that you're trying to protect. Not only do you need several full backups over time, but you must also contend with numerous incremental backups. For example, if you make weekly full backups and keep each backup for a month, you'll have four full backups on hand at any given time, not counting incremental backups. As your corporate data grows out of control, that spiraling volume is simply multiplied in your backups. The time and tape storage costs can become significant. This is a case where data deduplication technology can play an important role in backup, though it will never replace sound retention policies and decision making.
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