Cartika CEO Warns Against Using Snapshots as Backups

Cartika, Inc., a Canadian provider of managed application hosting and the creator of the Bacula4Hosts enterprise backup tool, has released an advisory cautioning cloud users against relying solely on snapshotting for backups.

As a provider of both IaaS and PaaS cloud platforms, Cartika is well placed to observe the consequences of improper cloud backup strategies, which can include the loss of business critical information and significant downtime.

Snapshots, which constitute a byte-for-byte copy of a VM, are one form of backup but snapshots as provided by most cloud vendors fail to account for a number of data loss scenarios. A major drawback of snapshot concerns the handling of backed-up data, which frequently remains on the same physical server or storage volume as the live VM. A failure of the infrastructure supporting the organization’s sites and services will also damage the backup or render fast restores impossible.

“Many cloud vendors market snapshots as a sufficient backup solution, but snapshotting technologies, while useful for VM duplication or rollbacks, are not a replacement for a specialized backup tool,” says Andrew Rouchotas, Cartika CEO, “Snapshots don’t understand file-systems or databases, which makes it more difficult to carry out selective data restoration and limits backup portability – moving snapshots between virtualization platforms is difficult, if not impossible.“

Advanced enterprise backup tools like Bacula4Hosts are built to provide more granular control of backups than snapshotting systems, including the ability to restore individual files, selected sets of files, databases and database tables, and mailboxes. Because they understand file-systems rather than being byte-for-byte copies, backups can be restored to bare metal or to any cloud platform. And, because enterprise backup solutions backup continuously and incrementally rather than relying on periodic snapshots, backups are more up-to-date and flexible.

Both snapshots and dedicated backup solutions have their place on the cloud and in data centers, but they offer different levels of protection. Snapshots should not be relied on as an organization’s sole backup strategy.