s anyone who has ever dealt with data knows, backup and recovery is an essential part of any data management strategy. But what happens when you change the format of your backups? What if you need to maintain access to data that was backed up by legacy systems no longer used in production? What happens when your existing backup solution goes end-of-life before your data retention policies expire?

When it comes to data backup and disaster recovery, one of the most important considerations is the backup catalog. In short, a catalog is a database that stores information about all of the data that has been backed up. This can include things like file attributes, location, and other metadata. In order to ensure that data can be quickly and easily recovered in the event of a disaster, it is essential to have a well-organized and up-to-date catalog. Otherwise, it can be very difficult to locate the desired data sets.

The GEN3i Migration Services team has developed extensive experience in understanding and manipulating catalog data from virtually every backup software provider. Our approach is typically to normalize the data and ingest it into a SQL database. Doing this gives us the ability to perform further analysis, manipulation or export as needed. In other words, we can take your backup data and turn it into something that's actually useful to you and provides you with the insights you need to make mission critical decisions about your business.

Catalog Ingestion is a process that helps ensure that historical backups are recoverable in the future by creating a map of where backup data resides, even without the original backup software. This ensures that if the software is no longer available, the data can still be recovered. This means that if you need to recover data from an old backup, you'll be able to do so even if the software has changed or is no longer available. Catalog ingestion is an essential service for any organization that wants to ensure it can recover its data from retired backup systems in the future.
After Catalog Ingestion, GEN3i can host the catalog as a service providing access through a cloud-based application or the catalog can be delivered to the client.

If you're looking to eliminate legacy backup systems and make sure your data is always safe and accessible, consider Catalog Services from GEN3i Migration Services.