Putting Your Data Backups on a Diet
In today’s information-driven world, the data we keep has a tendency to swell faster than an elastic waistline at an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet. Left uncontrolled, nightly backups of that data will compound the problem seven-fold. If you find yourself inching ever closer to the limits of your current backup solution, it might be time to shape up.
Fortunately, putting your data backups on a diet isn’t nearly as difficult as trying to lose a few pounds. Through the now-commonly used technology known as Common File Elimination (CFE), it’s pretty easy, in fact. Much like a diet reduces one’s waist, CFE reduces data waste.
Consider your company’s employee handbook. How many copies of the same book do you really need to back up? One for every person in the company? A new version for each new hire? With CFE, it’s unnecessary to repeatedly back up the same copy of the same document over and over again.
Rather, CFE backs up a single copy of the original document. Think about that for a minute. If you’ve got 100 employees saving their handbooks to the network, you are likely backing up 100 copies of the same exact book. Over and over, and over again. With CFE, you’ve just reduced the amount of data you back up from 100 copies to one. What’s more, the CFE process is intelligent enough to create a pointer for every copy of the handbook, all pointing to the version that you’ve backed up. That’s a drastic change, worthy of The Biggest Loser, to be sure!
But what about revisions? Fortunately, you can specify how many generations you’d like to back up of any one file. If you back up your data once daily, and you made changes to your original handbook once in March and then again in July, you’ll have three versions available to you: the most recently updated, as well as the two previous generations. How many versions you decide to keep is entirely up to you.
And because the amount of data you’re storing is decreased, you’ll also have room to store more data with less space, which, in turn, saves money. That bears repeating: Common File Elimination saves you money.
If you’re looking for a new data or cloud backup solution, make sure CFE is part of the package. Otherwise, you could find yourself unexpectedly shopping for yet another bigger pair of pants solution faster than you can say “supersize me.”
