Five Reasons to Backup to NAS - NovaStor

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Five Reasons to Backup to NAS NovaStor

Content Five Reasons to Backup to NAS ............................................................................................................. 3 Simple start to complex solutions ........................................................................................................ 3 Stop juggling with removable media .................................................................................................... 3 Centralized backups ............................................................................................................................... 4 Data security, even online...................................................................................................................... 4 Data integrity through redundancy ...................................................................................................... 4 About NovaStor ....................................................................................................................................... 5

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Five Reasons to Backup to NAS In today’s ever-changing tech ecosystem, the IT infrastructures for SMBs are being faced with consistently increasing amounts of business data that needs to be backed up. Not just has the amount of data being backed up grown but the number of machines being backed up or used in an office has grown exponentially as well. As the number of machines (particularly portables) increases, the necessity of a central backup destination to gather all backup data becomes obvious; enter Network Attached Storage devices. Network Attached Storage (or NAS) devices are effectively small file servers with very specialized operating systems installed for management and configuration that connect directly to your network through an Ethernet connection. Research shows [1] the NAS market growing by over 20% through 2016 as these technologies continue to improve over time. These devices help to overcome a wide range of challenges for SMB IT environments, and in the information below we will speak to those benefits.

Simple start to complex solutions NAS Backup: A simple start 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.

Stop juggling with removable media NAS Backup: Always online, always available – no need to juggle. Here at NovaStor 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.


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Centralized backups NAS Backup: Centralize your backup 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 underused because nothing else on the network can effectively access it. Using a NAS, you can push your entire network of workstation or server backups to a single destination rather than scattered around each machine.

Data security, even online NAS Backup: Safe and secure, even while it’s online. 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.

Data integrity through redundancy NAS Backup: Ensuring your data’s integrity through multiple-drive redundancy. 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 that your backup data is stored in the safest way possible when it’s sitting on your NAS.


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About NovaStor NovaStor (www.novastor.com) is a leading international provider of software solutions for data protection and availability. NovaStor's backup and restore software protects individual workstations and servers, as well as networks, data centers and cloud architectures. Clients include home, mobile, and SMB users, service providers as well as international corporations. NovaStor's cost-effective solutions are platform- and hardware-independent and ensure that optimal technological and economical use is gained from the customer's existing and future IT environment. NovaStor is headquartered in Switzerland (Zug), has offices in Germany (Hamburg) and the USA (CA, Agoura Hills), and is represented in numerous other countries through partnerships.


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