Debunking the image-based backup myth

The state of backup technology has moved forward, and many of the old assumptions are no longer true. For years, image-based backup was considered the industry standard. But today’s IT professionals really need full-system recovery capabilities without the built-in inefficiencies of legacy image backup products.

Image-based backup backups are far from ideal, especially for managed services providers (MSPs). Far from ideal means managing storage at multiple locations, spending too much time looking for and resolving issues, and unnecessary complexity. Staff time is an MSP’s most valuable resource and also its biggest expense and, in the world of backup, service–delivery costs to eat into profits pretty quickly.

Traditional image backup files are large, making backing up to the cloud time consuming and inefficient. Secure backup storage in a remote cloud storage location is your best protection against ransomware that can tamper with backup files stored on your local network. That makes local-only backup storage a risk no longer worth taking. To make this practical, managed services providers (MSPs) need a way to move less data for their customers.

This translates to needing a more efficient backup that’s built cloud first with this specific challenge in mind. While deduplication and data compression are common across most backup products, people often don’t realize the potential impact of the underlying backup architecture. For example, image-based backup software typically processes a 6% – 10% change rate between incremental backups, making these increases dramatically larger than with cloud-first backups. Continuing to use traditional image-based backup products requires more than 5.6 times the amount of storage and limits the number of restore points you can keep without spending more on local and cloud storage.

The image-based approach to backup demonstrates that it was built for a different era, when servers and storage devices sat beside each other in a single data center, and most companies had all night to conduct daily backups. Backup built for the pre-cloud era didn’t have to be very efficient. A modern cloud-first solution skips the clunky appliances, trims the fat from the data sets, and efficiently runs that data directly to the cloud.

Debunking the myths

Myth 1: Image-based backups are the only way to get full system recovery.

Mythbuster: If you back up both files and folders and system state with a single product, you’re set up for any type of recovery. The reality is that you need file-level backups 90% of the time. You shouldn’t have to wade through a full image to extract the one thing you need. Modern, cloud-first backup products offer file-level and system state backups with advanced filtering so you only back up what you truly need to restore. Backing up the full image brings with it unnecessary things (like temporary internet files) that bloat your storage requirements and cost you time and money. As long as you’ve got your full system state and data, it’s easy to get full system recovery when you need it, without the burden of full image backup.

Myth 2: Traditional image-based backup is faster.

Mythbuster: Because image-based incremental backup files are larger, sending them to the cloud takes more time than it needs to, limiting how frequently you can back up, which directly affects the service you can provide your customers. If you’re backing up once a day, a badly timed outage can result in the loss of 24 hours’ worth of data and productivity. A cloud-first approach makes incremental backups only a tiny fraction of the data being protected, allowing for fast, frequent backups and satisfying more demanding recovery point objectives.

Myth 3: Sending backups to the cloud isn’t feasible where internet connectivity is slow.

Mythbuster: With legacy image-based backup products, that may be true. But if incremental backups are a tiny fraction of the protected data, direct-to-cloud backups can take less than five minutes. Using a tool that was built from the ground up for cloud-first backups can reshape remote backup storage from impractical to straightforward and routine.

Myth 4: Technical staff spending 40 hours a month on backup administration is normal and unavoidable.

Mythbuster: If you use an efficient, all-in-one cloud-first backup product, time and complexity are reduced, meaning you can trust backup management to more junior staff.

Image-based backups cost senior technical staff time—and the business money. For example, if an MSP spends nine hours a week on backups and then another four or five hours fixing it and addressing service-level agreements, that’s money lost.

Myth 5: Traditional image backups consume less storage.

Mythbuster: Traditional image backups aren’t the most resource efficient. Switching to cloud-first backup means consuming up to five times less storage for the same number of restore points.

Beyond the basic storage cost, there is a higher chance of human error and potential data loss due to unnecessary complexity from managing multiple backup products, keeping up with growth in storage requirements, and connecting to third-party cloud storage providers.

Real-world results

According to Paul Foley of Procision IT, “Since switching to a cloud-first approach with N‑able^TM Backup, we’ve been able to recover money in staff time. I’d say we’ve recovered about 10 hours a week in real terms. That’s billable time that can go elsewhere. We’re talking $1,500 a week at a minimum.”

Brett Mason of Traction IT thought he had the best backup product, but over time, he realized senior staff could easily spend 20 – 40 hours a month on backup management. “For the business to move forward, we did need to free up those resources,” he said. The complexity and potential room for error resulted in many sleepless nights before he made the switch to N‑able Backup.

“I had a preconception about what backup was,” said Lionel Naidoo, of Dragon Information Systems. “N‑able had a really new, refreshing way of doing things.” Lionel was especially impressed by how quickly backups were compressed and sent offsite, allowing them to back up customer data more frequently than with traditional image backup.

As these MSPs found, there is a real difference between the way it’s always been done and a modern, cloud-first approach to data protection. The time and resource savings are real.

Conclusion

One key to backup confidence and recovery peace of mind is choosing a straightforward direct-to-cloud backup product with cloud storage included. Standardizing on one solution, such as N‑able Backup, allows even your junior staff to manage backups for all your customers, and their many data sources, from a single dashboard.

As data volume and criticality have grown, not every market leader has kept up. Moving to cloud-first decreases cost and complexity, resulting in more reliable and efficient data protection.