Forums/Product Support Solutions
Legacy Backup vs. Backup Vault
Support November 25, 2009
This article is designed to help customers understand the difference between a Legacy Backup and Backup Vault
Backup Vaults
Backup Vaults are storage containers within an online disk where your backup data resides for a single computer. A Backup Vault allows for block-level data de-duplication within and across multiple files and versions of files as well as compression for all data, which means greatly improved backup speeds and less total data stored. The Backup Vault offers a lot of great options to increase the speed and reduce amount of data that you backup, but the only downside to a Backup Vault is that it is NOT explorable or visible in the Network Drive or Web Access features. Backup Vaults only offer the option to backup or restore your data and you cannot manipulate or access the data in a Backup Vault directly. Backups Vaults can backup any size file.
Legacy Backup
The Legacy Backup feature allows you to keep files and folders on your local machine backed up automatically off-site to your Jungle Disk. Once data is backed up with Legacy Backup, your files will also be accessible via the Network Drive and Web Access options and you can always easily open or copy backed up files from your mapped drive back to your local machine. While Legacy Backup offers the convenience for exploring your data, it is less efficient in the way it stores your data, especially for keeping multiple versions of your files. For file versions, a full copy of each version would be stored which increases the amount of space used (For example, 5 previous versions of a 1GB file would store a total of 6GB. 1GB for the original and 5GB for the other previous versions). It is also important to note that Legacy Backups do not support files in excess of 5GB.
Which one should I use?
If you will not need to 'explore' or navigate back through the data that you are backing up (via the Network Drive or Web Access), then is it highly recommended that you use the a Backup Vault due to the optimizations of compression, de-dupe, etc. If you will ever need to browse or gain direct access to the data from an automatic backup, then a Legacy Backup would be required.
