A financial services company's main file server, containing 10 years of project data, is nearing its storage capacity. An internal audit reveals that all project files older than two years are no longer actively accessed but must be retained for seven more years due to regulatory compliance. The nightly incremental backups are also taking much longer to complete because they must process the entire large dataset. Which of the following is the MOST appropriate solution to address all these issues?
Migrate the backup strategy from incremental to differential to reduce backup media consumption.
Implement a synthetic full backup process to reduce the backup window for the primary server.
Archive the inactive project data to a separate, lower-cost storage tier and remove it from the primary server.
Perform a new full backup of the entire server to a larger LTO tape library.
The correct answer is to archive the inactive project data. Data archiving is the process of moving data that is no longer actively used to a separate, long-term storage location, often one that is more cost-effective. This directly addresses the three problems presented in the scenario: it frees up capacity on the primary file server, it removes the inactive data from the scope of the nightly backups, which will reduce the backup window, and it ensures the data is retained to meet regulatory compliance requirements.
Performing a new full backup to LTO tape does not solve the problem of the data consuming space on the primary server. Switching to differential backups might change the restore process but would not reduce the amount of data on the primary server or significantly shorten the overall backup process time. A synthetic full backup is a method for creating a new full backup from a previous full and subsequent incrementals on the backup media; it does not remove data from the source server and therefore does not free up primary storage space.
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