We continue discussing the best practice from storage engineering:

26) Containers – Data is organized as per the units of organization from the storage device or appliance. These containers however do not necessarily remain the same size because a user dictates what is packed in any container. Therefore, when it comes to data transfer, we can transfer a large container at a time or smaller. Also, users often have to specify attributes of the container and sometimes it could go wrong. Instead of correcting a container beyond salvage, it might be easier to recreate another and transfer the data.

27) Geographical location – Administrators often determine the sites where their data needs to be replicated. This involves choosing the locations which will have least latency to the users. This choice of sites may be common across data organizations and their owners and customized where the choices are inadequate.

28) Backup – although data backup has been cited earlier as a maintenance item, it is in fact the prudence on the part of the owner or administrator to determine which data needs to be backed up. Tools like duplicity use rsync protocol to determine incremental changes and storage products may have a way to do it or allow it to be externalized.

29) Aging – Generally the older the data, the more amenable it is for backup. The data age is progressive on the timeline. Therefore, it is easier to label the data as hot warm and cold so that the cut-off for age related treatments may then be taken. Cost savings on cheaper storage was touted as the primary motivation earlier but this has recently been challenged. That said, aged data lends itself to treatments such as deduplication.

30) Compression - Probably the hallmark of any efficient storage is in the packing of the data. Most data files and directories can be archived. For example, a tar ball is a convenient way to make web sites and installable portable. When the data is viewed in the form of binaries, a long sequence of either 0 or 1 can be efficiently packed. When the binary sequence flips way too often, it becomes efficient to not encode It and leave it as such. That said, there are many efficient compression techniques available.