Modern Backup Strategies for SaaS Platforms

 

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Introduction

As computing systems evolve, so do the features and capabilities that define them. This continuous advancement necessitates a review of traditional backup models and approaches, especially for users relying on SaaS platforms like Smartsheet. While these SaaS platforms boast impressive uptime metrics - often at 99.99% reliability - there remain essential reasons for companies and individual users to maintain backup and export plans and solutions for the data stored in these platforms.

Key Considerations

One key consideration in designing a modern backup strategy for your SaaS business data is the illusion of “unlimited” storage and data. Although SaaS providers market unlimited data and storage capacity, the reality is that building business solutions reliant on limitless data is impractical and problematic from an IT standpoint and potentially represent significant risks to the organization. Moreover, it is impossible to create an export or backup copy of an infinite amount of data.

To give you an example of some of these “scalability enhancements”, for most Smartsheet Enterprise customers, they have access to an “unlimited” number of Sheets and other assets, an “unlimited” number of Attachments, an “unlimited” amount of Storage, and other very large limitations, like Millions of Rows per Data Table. While these scalability features may sound attractive to Business Users, they potentially pose a huge risk for organizations from a CIO, governance, and IT management perspective.

Given these scenarios, legacy backup techniques like Grandfather-Father-Son (GFS) are no longer the most effective, or efficient solution for backing up SaaS applications. In addition, attempting to export all data, or significantly large amounts of data from a SaaS platform at once is impractical and, in many cases, unfeasible. Instead, modern approaches need to leverage incremental backup techniques, combined with flexible scheduling and innovative AI-like features and approaches in order to be effective.

Modern Backup Principles

At AcuWorkflow, having developed and refined the current version of our SmartBackup solution for Smartsheet customers over the past four years, and taking into consideration the very large amount of experience, knowledge, and feedback gained through real life deployments across customers of all sizes, segments, industries and regions, we have come to the realization that a new, modern approach to backup strategy is in order, especially for backing up SaaS platform data from an online application like Smartsheet. 

With this knowledge and these insights in hand, we are embarking on a new product roadmap to integrate modern backup principles into our product portfolio, and we will be accomplishing this through a phased approach, starting with the next release of our SmartBackup solution.

ShadowCopy

To facilitate this transition, the introduction of the new ShadowCopy function in the latest version of SmartBackup, offers a novel method for exporting large amounts of Smartsheet data and assets quickly and effectively. This new approach embraces efficiency and scalability, ensuring customer Smartsheet administrators have a reliable and manageable export backup solution in today’s evolving digital landscape.

As businesses continue to embrace cloud-based platforms, reviewing and refining backup strategies is not just advisable—it’s essential. With tools like ShadowCopy, organizations can maintain control over their Smartsheet data while adapting to the ever-changing SaaS environment.

ShadowCopy is a function in SmartBackup that provides a method of copying Smartsheet assets - including sheets and attachments (and dashboards and reports in the future) - to a designated external file store location. It provides an efficient way to create regular data copies for auditing, eDiscovery, historical records, disaster recovery planning (DRP), Data Migration, and governance purposes.

The primary distinction between the SmartBackup Backup function and the new ShadowCopy function lies in where and how the copies are stored. Backup duplicates the sheets within Smartsheet, maintaining an exact replica with all its original details intact. In contrast, ShadowCopy exports copies of the sheets to an external file store outside of Smartsheet, ensuring that the most important data is exported, while some Smartsheet-specific elements may not be preserved, due to inherent limitations of the Smartsheet API.

This means that essentially, copies of the most critical organizational data living in Smartsheet are copied and saved outside of Smartsheet in a very efficient way, and in a format that makes it easy for IT administrators to search and find sheets, assets, and data that they are looking for in support of critical data restores due to deletions and data corruption, and for disaster recovery, eDiscovery, or auditing requirements.

ShadowCopy has additional features that provide even more value for IT administrators. One of these features is the ability to offload essential metadata for disaster recovery and reference needs. In ShadowCopy, this is called the “DRP feature”.

This DRP feature secures the following metadata for the organization’s entire Smartsheet implementation:

  • Full User List
  • Full Workspace List
  • Full Sheet List
  • Folder outline for each User

When the DRP feature is scheduled to run every 30 days, for example, then it will provide a “snapshot” of the Smartsheet environment which administrators will be able to use for restore operations, or for situations where it is necessary to have a reference or historical record of key aspects of the Smartsheet implementation.

Another new feature that will be built into ShadowCopy in a future release is the “Quota” feature. As data is constantly being copied and saved outside of Smartsheet to an external file store location, over time, the storage space consumed by those copies will grow and continue to grow, and at some point, the available storage will be depleted, resulting in job failures and errors.

The purpose of the Quota feature is to automatically delete older exported copies from the file store location, to make space for new export copies to be saved. 

The way it works is that a site quota limit is set in ShadowCopy, and when the ShadowCopy files approach the “75% full” mark, then the Quota Feature will kick in and will delete older files, to limit the storage usage to around 75% max. This means that there is always a specific amount of storage space reserved on disk.

When combined with an optimized scheduling scheme and customizable runbooks, ShadowCopy represents an innovative, modern approach to creating exported backups for Smartsheet customers.

Roadmap

Once the new ShadowCopy solution has been integrated into SmartBackup and has been proven in production deployments, we will move onto applying those similar modern backup strategies and techniques to the other SmartBackup functions, including Backup and Archive.

At the end of this journey, SmartBackup will have evolved into an even more capable, comprehensive, and sophisticated backup solution for Smartsheet customers. Providing additional stability, capability, and performance enhancements.

Stay tuned for the launch of our new ShadowCopy function and the subsequent updates to SmartBackup – coming soon!

More Information

Visit our website at www.acuworkflow.com for more information, or contact us at sales@acuworkslow.com if you have any questions.

Visit our page on the Smartsheet Solution Center: https://www.smartsheet.com/marketplace/apps/smartbackup-smartsheet.

Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/acuworkflow.


View the Flipbook version and download a PDF here: https://qr1.be/UVCB






Location: Murrieta, CA, USA

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