Audit your data
The first step is to take stock of what you currently have stored for offline backup. Go through all your external hard drives, optical discs, tapes, and any other media you use to store backups. Make a list of everything that is backed up and estimate the amount of storage space used. This will give you a baseline to work from.
Key things to look for:
- Duplicates – Do you have the same files backed up in multiple places?
- Old/unused files – Are you still backing up files you no longer need?
- Large files – Make note of any huge files like videos that are taking up a lot of space.
Getting a handle on exactly what you have backed up is crucial to understanding what can be minimized.
Evaluate backup necessity
Next, go through your data and honestly determine what needs to be backed up and what doesn’t. For example:
- Old projects or files you will likely never access again can potentially be removed.
- Things stored in other places like cloud drives or services may not need redundant backups.
- Temporary files or caches that can easily be recreated later if needed.
Try to separate your data into categories:
- Critical – Files absolutely necessary to backup like financial documents, photos, or projects in progress.
- Important – Data that would be inconvenient but not catastrophic to lose. For example, old completed projects.
- Low Importance – Files that are nice to have but not imperative to backup like system caches.
Focus your backup efforts on the critical and important categories going forward.
Consolidate and eliminate duplicates
Now that you’ve categorized your data, it’s time to consolidate. Locate all instances of duplicate files and keep only one copy of each. Try to move all critical and important data to a single master backup location. This avoids the sprawl of important files across multiple drives and backups.
Tips for consolidation:
- Use file comparison software to identify copies of the same file taking up space.
- Organize critical data into main folders rather than fragmenting across drives.
- Double check that any duplicate eliminated is truly identical before deleting.
Consolidating minimizes the overhead of duplicated data in your backups.
Compress existing data
Standard file compression techniques can significantly reduce the storage required for backups. Solutions range from compressed file formats to archiving software that combines and compresses multiple files together.
Examples of compression techniques:
- Store photos and images in compressed JPG format rather than uncompressed formats like BMP.
- Use archiving software like 7-Zip or WinRAR to compress folders of files together into smaller ZIP or RAR archives.
- Use compressed data formats for backups like compressed NTFS if backing up system drives.
Spending time compressing existing backed up data can liberate a lot of storage space.
Incremental backup
With an initial full backup as a baseline, you can save considerable storage by doing incremental backups going forward. These only backup new or changed data since the last backup. For example, if only 5% of data changes per day, increments require much less space than full backups.
Implementing incremental backup:
- Use backup software that supports incremental capabilities.
- Do weekly full backups but daily incremental between them.
- Set a recurrence to re-do full backups every so often to limit incremental overhead.
This prevents fully re-backing up unchanged data repeatedly.
Evaluate backup media
The media used to store backups also determines costs and capacity. Assess if your current media choice is optimal or if alternatives like tapes or the cloud might offer savings.
Media considerations:
- Online/cloud backup services provide offsite storage without physical media costs. But limited capacity and bandwidth costs.
- Tape drives offer huge capacities for low cost but are slower and inconvenient to access.
- External hard drives are fast and convenient but cost more per TB than tapes or cloud.
Evaluate media options based on access requirements, onsite vs offsite storage needs, and costs.
Prioritize critical data
If you are still struggling with capacity look at what files are using the most space. These are likely large videos, disk images, or other files of low backup criticality. Consider dropping the backup of these from rotations if absolutely necessary.
Tips for prioritizing:
- Sort your backup inventory by size to identify large low priority files.
- Drop obsolete system backups from rotations once newer backups are verified.
- Consider not backing up large files like movies that could be reacquired if lost.
Ruthlessly review backups to ensure only truly vital data takes up prime storage space.
Conclusion
Getting backups under control requires diligently analyzing what you have, consolidating duplicates, compressing existing data, implementing incremental backups, optimizing backup media, and ultimately prioritizing only business critical information. Used together these tips can help significantly reduce offline backup storage and costs.
