Top Five Reasons to Backup to NAS

As the Technical Product Manager for NovaBACKUP, it is my job to make sure that our team is meeting the unique demands of the ever-changing world of data integrity from a technology standpoint. Recently we’ve been doing some research and found that our customers are using Network Attached Storage devices significantly more often than in the past.

It turns out we’re not alone in that realization, with IT research firm IDC (www.IDC.com) releasing a report earlier this year stating that NAS technology continues to represent one of the fastest-growing segments of the worldwide small-office and single-home-office storage markets [1].

With NAS devices becoming more prominent in the market and no end in sight to their growth I figured it was a great time to outline why some of you might want to use a NAS device as part of your backup solution if you aren’t already.

NAS offers a simple start to complex solutions

Why NAS? It’s a simple start to your storage requirements that expands to a complex solution.

Let’s face facts: Nobody can predict the future. The big firms of the world might know how much storage they’re going to use in the next 6 / 12 / 18 months but for the small business owner, the only thing that matters is that you get your data backed up today. Luckily, most SMB-focused NAS solutions offer expandable storage, allowing you to start backing up today and scale the storage as required. This means you can stop worrying about your backups and start worrying about what matters: your business.

NAS allows you to stop juggling with removable media

Why NAS? It’s an always-online, always-available backup medium so you don’t need to juggle multiple drives/tapes / CDs / DVDs for schedules.

Here at NovaBACKUP, we place a high value on reliable offsite backup solutions, but maintaining your daily or weekly backups on removable/rotating media might just be too clumsy for those of you interested in running your business, not your backups. Making sure you have the right drive connected for tonight’s backup job or trying to figure out which tape has the data you need to restore can get downright ugly at times. NAS devices are always online and available for backup, no need to rotate.

NAS allows for centralized backups

Why NAS? It centralizes all of your data backups and storage requirements to a single device.

One of the biggest reasons we see our customers using removable media of any kind for their daily or weekly backups is that their individual servers simply don’t have enough direct storage available. Those servers that do have enough space are very often under-used because nothing else on the network can effectively access them. Using a NAS, you can push your entire network of workstations or server backups to a single destination rather than being scattered around each machine.

NAS offers data security, even online

Why NAS? Data security is built into the device, offering a secure backup destination, even on your network.

Making sure you have a backup of your data is good, making sure nobody else can get to your backup is better. While NovaBACKUP has the ability to encrypt your backups, that’s just one piece of the big picture that is data security. Most modern NAS drives provide for LDAP/Active Directory integration and those that don’t still generally have some form of NAS-based user permissions. This allows you to keep your backups centralized in your network but make sure the data is only accessible to those people that matter.

NAS provides data integrity through redundancy

Why NAS? Most SMB-focused NAS devices ensure data integrity through multiple-drive redundancy (RAID).

It’s an unfortunate fact of life that all backup solutions are prone to one thing: physical destruction. Whether it’s magnetism in the case of tape backups, disk/platter failure in traditional hard drives, or lifespan expectancy of SSD drives every backup medium has a weakness. For NAS devices, most SMB-focused products offer hardware-based RAID solutions to help alleviate the risk of drive failure for your backup data by maintaining redundant copies across multiple physical drives. This means when you back up to NAS that your backup data is stored in the safest way possible.

At NovaBACKUP, we dedicate ourselves to making sure we provide the best network-attached storage backup solutions for your backup requirements. In addition to NovaBACKUP and an effective backup strategy, Network Attached Storage devices help ensure your backups and restores are as fast as possible, as secure as possible, and as easy as possible to use.