Is It Right to Compress Your Backup Data?

To save the drive space, many users may select to compress their backup data. Yet, there are some users who are still suspecting whether it is right. Hence, in this post, we will look at this issue and expose its pros and cons in detail.

More and more users have understood the significance of data backup in that the backup data will make future data recovery much easier. For instance, if you have backed up your Outlook data file, even if original file gets corrupted, you still can recover Outlook data from backup file. Therefore, making regular data backup is vitally important.

Yet, with timing going on, more and more backup files, and you will discover that backups have taken up a lot of disk space. Under this circumstance, you have two alternatives to deal with it. One is to delete the older backups. And the other one is to compress the backup data. Many users prefer to select the latter one. But at the same time, they fear that compression will make some troubles. Therefore, in the followings, we will expose the advantages and disadvantages of compressing backup data, helping you make your own decision.

Advantages

Compression is actually a mathematical process which can take data and make it smaller via removing the redundancy and repeated patterns. In other words, it is able to reduce the file side by encoding the data in a much more effective way.

So, it is apparent that the most superior advantage of compressing your backup data is that it can make your backup data smaller, therebsy saving a lot of space on the backup storage device. Therefore, if your device tends to run out of space, it is a good option to compress the backup data.

Disadvantages

Nevertheless, compressing backup data can cause some troubles as well, like the followings.

1. First off, compression is a kind of CPU-intensive activity. If your PC is too old and slow, it’s inadvisable to run compression during backup. Otherwise, your computer may be prone to get stuck and even crash.
2. In addition, compression backups will take some time, which will make the duration of backup much longer. Similarly the course of restoring backup will take more time as well.
3. If the entire backup is compressed, when a bad sector appears in the backup, it’ll be more difficult to recover the backup. That is to say, if a single bit goes wrong, all the left of compressed data will become compromised, too. In a nutshell, a single error can damage the whole backup in a moment.

Author Introduction:

Shirley Zhang is a data recovery expert in DataNumen, Inc., which is the world leader in data recovery technologies, including sql recovery and outlook repair software products. For more information visit www.datanumen.com