A succinct yet thorough summary of enterprise laptop backup best practices.

1. A Druva Whitepaper
Corporate PC Backup - Best Practices
This whitepaper explains best practices for successfully implementing laptop
backup for corporate workforce.
White Paper – WP /100 /009
Oct 10

2. October 12, 2010 Whitepaper – Corporate PC Backup – Best Practices
Table of Contents
Introduction ............................................................................................................................................................ 2
Understanding Who Needs Data Backup in Your Organization ............................................................................. 3
Deciding What Needs to be Backed Up .................................................................................................................. 3
PC Imaging and Bare-Metal Restore ................................................................................................................... 4
Deciding Backup Policies and Resources ................................................................................................................ 5
Data Deduplication – Saving Bandwidth and Storage ........................................................................................ 5
WAN Optimization .............................................................................................................................................. 5
Your Private Cloud - Planning Backup Infrastructure ............................................................................................. 6
Service Level Guarantees - Understanding RPO and RTO ................................................................................... 6
Scale Up Vs Scale Out ......................................................................................................................................... 7
Training Users – Power of Self Service ................................................................................................................... 8
Management and Reporting................................................................................................................................... 9
Summary ................................................................................................................................................................. 9
About Druva.......................................................................................................................................................... 10
Data Sources and References ............................................................................................................................... 10
Introduction
With the volume of enterprise data doubling every eighteen months, businesses are seeking new ways to
tackle their data protection challenges. While data growth is not new, the pace of growth has become more
rapid, the location of data more dispersed, and the linkage between data sets more complex. Backing up all
that data is clearly a major and growing concern for enterprises.
Only 32% of enterprises report that they are successfully able to protect their critical remote corporate data.
The reason: while PC backup initially appears similar to server backup, it has completely different goals and
service requirements. With users data scattered all across the organization, consolidating all of these
requirements requires a different approach.
With over 80% corporate data duplicate across PC users, Data deduplication offers companies the opportunity
to dramatically reduce the amount of storage and bandwidth required for backups.
The whitepaper looks at various available contemporary technologies to recommend best recommended
practices for corporate PC backup.
2 Druva Software

3. October 12, 2010 Whitepaper – Corporate PC Backup – Best Practices
Understanding Who Needs Data Backup in Your Organization
The best starting point for your corporate PC data backup strategy is to identify the users who are most in
need of consistent data backup. Part of that is based on determining where the need is greatest. This for
many companies translates into ‘where the risk of lost data is greatest.’ Consider the following cases:
1. The loss of critical user data which is not saved locally
2. Critical data is modified unintentionally and an older version is needed
3. A remote or traveling user loses his laptop
4. A remote or traveling user is unable to find critical data on laptop
5. In the case where a central copy of data is maintained, but a self-service data restore could save a lot
of time
Clearly some departments easily qualify for the above mentioned use case –
1. Marketing and sales staff working remotely
2. Accounts department working with critical data
3. Business critical users working on sensitive data
4. CXO’s with business critical information
5. Consultants and remote workers
Some departments like the software engineering team could skip the backup as most of the work is already
maintained in a centrally managed revision control system.
Deciding What Needs to be Backed Up
The simplest approach would be to backup everything, but this may not be practical, considering the average
size of data on corporate PCs:
1. Operating system , applications and settings – 25 GB
2. Critical corporate user data – 10 GB
3. Browser cache and temporary files – 2 GB
4. Personal Images and videos – 4 GB
5. Daily change in data – 2%
Simple math shows that the storage needed to accomplish just the initial backup of critical corporate data for
100 users could be more than 1 TB. With daily changes in data, a simple approach of weekly full and daily
incremental could consume about 5 TB. This clearly indicates that the decision on which data to back up is a
selective one.
Blanket selections like user’s home directory should be avoided as it may contain a large number of unwanted
files e.g. browser cache and temporary files.
 Popular file formats which should be included –
o Microsoft Outlook
o Microsoft Office documents
o PDFs, HTML, Text files
 File formats which should be excluded from backup –
o Images files
o Video and audio files
3 Druva Software

4. October 12, 2010 Whitepaper – Corporate PC Backup – Best Practices
o Executables and DLLs (most common source of malwares and virus)
o Archives
o Temporary and cache files
 Folders which should be filtered from backup –
o Browser Cache and temporary files
o System files and folders
PC Imaging and Bare-Metal Restore
Backing up the complete PC including operating system, application and settings is called PC Imaging. And
restoring everything back to a PC from scratch is known as “Bare-Metal Restore (BMR)”.
BMR definitely makes the job of the IT administrator a lot simpler as he doesn’t need to install the operating
system and application on a faulty PC again, he can simply restore them from the backed up data. But,
considering the size of modern day operating system, this may create a huge amount of data on the backup
server - about 30GB for each PC. Considering the scalability issues, it’s recommended to limit BMR to limited
set of users.
Imaging may again not be suitable for the remote users as any automatic operating system update on the PC
may trigger a large backup which may takes a long time to complete.
4 Druva Software

5. October 12, 2010 Whitepaper – Corporate PC Backup – Best Practices
Deciding Backup Policies and Resources
It is highly recommended that you set up the backup policies centrally for all users. Since all users have
different backup needs, it is recommended to group the users in smaller sets based on following needs:
1. Network availability: Users working locally vs. remotely
2. Bandwidth access: What percentage of bandwidth should be dedicated to backup
3. Storage quota: Power users vs. normal users
4. Backup frequency: How often to backup
5. Retention Policy: How many data revisions to maintain
6. Special privileges: Should the user be allowed to add his/her own folders to backup
Services remote users means that just like the Email and Web server, the backup server should be made
available to remote users over VPN or a firewall. It’s highly recommended to choose backup software which
supports client triggered backup (rather than more common - server triggered backup). Client triggered
backup ensures that the backup server only accepts and services incoming backup and restore requests, and
can work with same set of network and security policies applicable for Email and Web servers.
Bandwidth is the most precious resource especially for the remote user. The bandwidth usage should be
carefully chosen to make sure that the backups don’t disrupt the user’s work and at the same time it’s
sufficient to complete backups within the designated time.
Storage quota and retention policy greatly affect the central storage available for storing backed up data.
These should be carefully chosen to avoid excessive use of the central storage.
Data Deduplication – Saving Bandwidth and Storage
Bandwidth and storage are two biggest concerns for
corporate PC backup. But, if you look closely, over 80% data
[3]
is duplicated across corporate users . To avoid duplicity of
data on backup server, it’s highly recommended to use
backup software which supports source based data
deduplication.
Data deduplication ensures that files duplicated across users
are backed up only once saving over 90% backup time,
bandwidth and storage. Since a large majority of data on PCs
is in the form on emails, the deduplication technology should
be smart enough to find out email level duplicates.
WAN Optimization
Users working remotely face another challenge - the low-latency of VPN or WAN network. In order to
effectively utilize the available bandwidth it is recommended to choose the backup software or the network
infrastructure capable of WAN optimization. WAN Optimization optimizes packet size, removes redundancy in
protocol and maintains multiple network connections to overcome the network latency. Since backup
software is aware of the type or data, it is highly recommended that WAN optimization is provided as part of
the backup software.
5 Druva Software

6. October 12, 2010 Whitepaper – Corporate PC Backup – Best Practices
Your Private Cloud - Planning Backup Infrastructure
PC backup is very different from server backup. While backing server, the data usually originates from few
servers usually in same locality. But the PCs may be larger in number and the data is usually scattered across
multiple offices or even travelling with the user. At any given point in time, the PC backup server could be
serving several parallel backup and restore requests.
Building the backup infrastructure, needs the knowledge of following important parameters –
1. Number of parallel backups
2. Service level guarantees
3. Total number of users
4. Data retention policy
5. Number of remote users
The biggest bottleneck for PC backup setup is the network. A simple 10/100 Mbps Ethernet (LAN) network can
only support 10-11 MBps (Mega “Bytes” per sec.) traffic which means at most 50 parallel backups. In order to
plan a larger setup, it’s recommended to consider multiple networks and NICs attached to the backup server.
The total number of users and the retention policy decides the size of storage needed to manage the backed
up data. Using deduplication aware backup software could greatly impact the storage size. With over 80% data
being duplicate across users, using deduplication could reduce the size of the storage by over 90%.
Service Level Guarantees - Understanding RPO and RTO
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) describes the acceptable amount of data loss in time, i.e. up to what point can
you recover the data and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) describes the time taken to recover it.
Both these parameters form the foundation of any backup implementation. Example - 60 minutes RPO would
mean that backup of every PC must be taken at least once every hour and 15 minutes RTO means that it
should take no longer than 15 minutes to get the last copy back. The service deployment, solution availability
and disaster recovery plans should be designed to meet these goals.
Few important points to consider for lower RPO –
1. Backup small, backup often
2. Provide backup to remote workers over WAN/VPN
3. The backup software should support near-CDP (continuous data protection), i.e. it shouldn’t
undertake scanning and full backup every time
4. Make sure backup is immediately scheduled when user connects to a network or tries to shut down
the computer
Few important points to consider for lower RTO -
1. Fast self-service online data restore
2. Search based interface to restore a must
3. The traditional approach of incremental/differential backup is a major deal breaker
4. Service high-availability a must
6 Druva Software

7. October 12, 2010 Whitepaper – Corporate PC Backup – Best Practices
Scale Up Vs Scale Out
The Scale-Up architecture uses fewer heavy duty servers capable of handling the entire load. Scale Out
architecture uses a number of small servers, each of which handles some of the load.
Scale-Up Vs Scale-Out Architecture
The scale-out architecture definitely requires more management time, but since the biggest bottleneck for PC
backup is the network, the architecture scales much better and is highly recommended. Even from the service
availability point of view, the scale-out architecture does not compromise the entire service if one of the
servers goes down.
7 Druva Software

8. October 12, 2010 Whitepaper – Corporate PC Backup – Best Practices
Training Users – Power of Self Service
Servicing users especially those working remotely could be a major challenge of they don’t understand or are
not comfortable using the backup software. In fact statistics show that remote users demand 240% more
[10]
administration time than local users . Before deciding upon the backup software, it’s highly recommended
to pilot the software with a variety of users to test its acceptance.
Ease of use and self-service could really aid the adoption of the solution and greatly reduce the administration
time. Some of the highly recommended features for faster adoption are –
1. Completely automated deployment with remote push for backup policy
2. A simple 5 step guide to start the first backup and restore data
3. Simple search based self service restore
4. Automated troubleshooting for simple issues like network error, VSS failures etc.
8 Druva Software

9. October 12, 2010 Whitepaper – Corporate PC Backup – Best Practices
Management and Reporting
For larger organizations it’s recommended to
choose software which supports role based
administration. This way the backup administrator
can delegate some of the responsibilities of each
user group.
Good reporting features ensure the reliability of
the backup process and help the administrator
manage large enterprise installations. Readily
available information such as live server statistics,
instant alert notifications and scheduling
comprehensive reports, make administration
interactive and allow the administrator to
troubleshoot, manage configuration and fine-tune
the system better.
It is highly recommended to configure the backup
software for following reports –
1. Failed backup – daily report
2. Restore failures – instant alert
3. Service availability – instant alerts
4. Status of last backup – weekly report
5. Storage utilization – weekly report
6. Bandwidth utilization – weekly report
7. Configuration changes – weekly report
Summary
This document showcases the best practices an enterprise can adopt while deploying a backup solution to
backup their critical data. Given the diversity of data, rapidly increasing volume of critical enterprise data, a
large number of remote users, enterprises need to be smart about identifying which users need backup and
which data is critical enough to be backed up. Once this is done, they need a backup solution that saves
storage and bandwidth, offers scalability, is simple to install and use and, allows hands-on, interactive
administration.
9 Druva Software

10. October 12, 2010 Whitepaper – Corporate PC Backup – Best Practices
About Druva
Druva provides premium enterprise-class solutions for data protection and disaster recovery. Our products-
powered by our patented Continuous Data Protection and Data deduplication technologies—are changing the
way enterprises manage and protect their data.
For more information please refer to the website at www.Druva.com.
Data Sources and References
1. Gartner Report #160375 – Options for PC Data Backup
2. Gartner Report #616611 – Storage Management Software Usage Driven by Replication, Deduplication
and Virtualization (March 2008)
3. Microsoft Report – “SIS and its effects at Microsoft”
4. Computer Data Trends – Matt’s computer trends - http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/
5. Hardware Trends – Tom’s hardware trends - http://www.tomshardware.com/
6. Tom’s 15 Years of Disk Performance (here)
7. Matt’s hard disk data trends (here)
8. PC World / Ponemon Institute – Laptops lost like hot cakes (see here).
9. Detailed inSync Benchmarks – “Druva inSync Benchmark Results”
10. Biztalk – Data Leakage Prevention, Emerging Trends (here)
10 Druva Software