One of the challenges of remote offices with limited bandwidth and plenty of data is how to protect that data. Building a local backup infrastructure can be cost prohibitive and usually the best option is to backup the data to the company’s data center or to a cloud provider.

But how do you initially bring the data to the backup server without impacting the business users using the wide area network (WAN)?

There are three options:

1. The first option is to “seed” the initial backup. Start the backup locally to a USB drive, ship the drive to the data center, copy the data, then perform subsequent backups to the data center.

2. Use the WAN to backup the data but throttle the bandwidth until it completes. WAN utilization will be low, but it may take some time to complete.

3. Use the WAN to backup data and divvy up the data into smaller chunks. So that the users will not be affected during business hours, run the backup jobs only during off-hours and during the weekends. This may also take some time to complete.