Have you ever checked out those too-good-to-be-true vacation deals advertised online? They usually include a great price on an airline ticket and three or four nights in a nice hotel. But among other gotchas, the return departure times are inconvenient, there’s a three hour stop over and you have to fly on Puddle Jumper Airlines. People are so excited about the getaway, they don’t pay much attention to the getting home. It’s human nature.

Data managers can easily fall into the same trap. Looking for a faster, more efficient backup solution is only half the story. You also need to restore data quickly and easily too. That may not be as easy as you think. Consider the following when evaluating a backup solution:

A lot of backup solutions can only restore data through the same port that was used to back it up. Even if you have several completely idle ports, your restore job will wait until the specific port that backed up the data you need is available. Consider a backup solution that lets you backup and restore from any available port.

If you are asking your VTL to complete a large-volume enterprise backup within your backup window and deduplicate it, and restore some portion of it within your lifetime, you better be able to run more than one node at a time. Be sure that your backup solution can apply all available processing power where it’s needed.

All deduplication technologies replace duplicate data with pointers to a single copy. To restore data, they have to use the pointers to reassemble the data you need. If your data is scattered all over your disk, and if it is only using one node, reassembly may take a lot longer than you think. Consider a backup solution that keeps the most recent (and not coincidently the most likely to be restored) backup intact and deduplicates the old stuff.

Bottom line. Getting your data backed up is only half the challenge. Before you choose a backup solution, don’t forget to plan the return trip.