From invoices and emails to sensor data and audio files, organizations use a wide variety of unstructured data in their daily operations. While this type of data is essential to most organizations, it presents some unique challenges to organizations that want to properly back their data. As your organization attempts to back up its unstructured data securely and efficiently, you’ll need to know what unstructured data is, the main challenges of backing it up, and how to overcome these challenges to avoid data loss.
What Is Unstructured Data?
Unstructured data refers to information not stored in a predefined data scheme or model. This type of data is also far more common than structured data, with unstructured data estimated to make up 80% to 90% of all data. Unlike structured data, which must be stored in a predefined format, unstructured data is stored in its native format. Some common examples of unstructured data include:
- Internet of Things (e.g., ticker and sensor data)
- Document collections (e.g., emails, records, word documents, invoices)
- Rich media (e.g., surveillance, audio, weather, media, entertainment, and geo-spatial data)
- Analytics (e.g., AI and machine learning data)
Structured data isn’t superior or inferior to unstructured data. Rather, both types of data serve different purposes. For example, a warehouse might track its inventory with structured data in a relational database while still using plenty of unstructured data in the form of invoices and emails.
Why It’s Important to Back Up Unstructured Data
Backing up unstructured data is essential in any organization. Since unstructured data makes up most of the data used at organizations, losing it could significantly impact your organization. For example, if a data loss event affects your organization, you could lose essential employee records, invoices, and projects. Some of this data may not be recoverable, and even if your team can manually recreate some lost data, it can be very time-consuming.
Alongside the threat of permanently losing data or having to dedicate precious time to recreating it, some of your unstructured data may fall under data compliance regulations. These regulations often require backups of data, and organizations that lose data related to these regulations can be subject to fines and other penalties.
By backing up your unstructured data, you can remain compliant with any data regulations applicable to your business, protect your organization from losing non-recoverable data, and ensure your team remains efficient after a data loss event.
What Are the Main Challenges of Backing Up Unstructured Data?
Since unstructured data isn’t stored in a predefined format and often makes up the majority of a company’s data, it can be a bit more difficult to make sure you’re backing it all up. By knowing the main challenges of backing up unstructured data and having the information to solve these challenges, you can make backing up unstructured data far easier and faster at your organization.
As you try to improve your unstructured data backup strategy, review the four main challenges of backing up unstructured data and how to solve them below:
1. Unstructured Data Scales Continuously
Unstructured data makes up the majority of most organizations’ data and, due to its regular use, will only continue to grow. This consistent growth of data can make it difficult to back it all up.
If you don’t have a backup provider who can handle this data, your team will have to devise strategies to manually back it up. This might include physical storage media like external hard drives, thumb drives, or local servers. Managing your own hardware and working with end users to make sure they are putting files in the right places is time-consuming and error prone. This backup approach can also be costly, as you’ll need to regularly purchase new storage devices to keep up with your unstructured data’s growth.
Instead of trying to back up the data manually, partner with a backup provider that automatically compresses your data and scales to meet your needs. By doing so, you won’t have to worry about the time and financial cost of constantly adding and maintaining more physical storage media. Even better: partner with a backup provider that doesn’t cap your storage capacity or charge extra for growing data sets, and you’ll benefit from predictable backup costs.
2. Unstructured Data Is Modified Often
Many types of unstructured data are works-in-progress with team members adding new information to them throughout the day or even over months or years. If your unstructured data is regularly modified, it is hard to track what data needs to be backed up again to include any changes. Not having the most recent version of your unstructured data backed up results in lost work and greater demands on your team if the data is lost.
Instead of manually tracking changes to unstructured data, it’s best to go with a backup provider that monitors your files in real-time to detect changes. Ideally, the backup provider will use data deduplication to check small blocks of data in your files every few minutes to see if they have been backed up before, and then only send that new or changed data to their cloud storage. This backup method ensures the user’s computer doesn’t take a performance hit from needing to upload lots of unnecessary data.
Once it finds a block that hasn’t been backed up previously, it should automatically encrypt the block before uploading it to its backup destination. This automatic backup approach ensures all unstructured data is backed up securely, regardless of how often you update it.
3. Some Unstructured Data May Be Subject to Compliance Requirements
If you have unstructured data that contains personally identifiable information (PII) or other types of information subject to compliance requirements, you have to ensure this data is backed up in accordance with these requirements.
Unfortunately, finding PII and sensitive data in unstructured data can be difficult, especially if you have lots of it to sift through. When your team doesn’t clearly mark unstructured data, it could be backed up inappropriately, leading to fines and penalties.
Fixing this issue starts with identifying any unstructured data that’s subject to compliance regulations. Your team should take stock of unstructured data, tag any data with sensitive information, and store all of it with appropriate access controls and security features. When backing up this data to a provider’s cloud, you’ll need to verify your backup solution complies with any relevant regulations and will securely handle your unstructured data. If you’re backing up all data on users’ endpoints, you greatly increase your ability to catch all sensitive information, even if it exists as “shadow data” that’s easily missed.
4. Improperly Backed Up Unstructured Data Can Cause Organizations to Fail Their RTOs
When a data loss event occurs in an organization, team members have to react fast to restore the lost data within their recovery time objective (RTO). Since unstructured data is often disorganized and hard to locate, it can significantly slow down the time it takes to recover lost data and return to normal operations. This issue is heightened as an organization creates more unstructured data that it has to back up and restore.
To address this challenge and cut down on downtime after a data loss event, organizations can invest in a backup provider with tools that allow them to prioritize files for restoration. Since you may only need to restore essential types of unstructured data to meet your RTO, being able to prioritize files by importance can speed up the restoration process and help you meet your RTO.
CrashPlan: Unstructured Data Backup Solutions
CrashPlan’s endpoint backup solutions are built to comprehensively back up unstructured data on employee endpoints. CrashPlan automatically backs up your endpoint data every fifteen minutes, utilizing real-time file monitoring that tracks when a file is updated. It also includes the ability to prioritize recently changed files for backup and restoration. Our uncapped storage feature scales as your data backup needs evolve, and we employ the most robust features to ensure your data is backed up in accordance with compliance regulations.
Learn more about our endpoint backup solutions today. If you’d like to try our endpoint backup solutions for unstructured data, please sign up for our free trial.
About the Author
