The competition

No business today can afford not to backup critical business data.  It's a disaster waiting to happen and the potential consequences are real.  Here are some real-life examples of data loss and the consequences:

• A major research and development facility depending on temporary staff for IT support experienced a two-day disruption when a disgruntled former employee returned unnoticed through the temporary employment agency and sabotaged databases.
• A computer programmer modified a production database without following approved software release procedures. The result was financial loss of nearly £750,000.
• A medium-size travel organisation experienced severe embarrassment, inconvenience and financial loss when their email system failed and lost all pending email messages.
• A large hospital lost the entire pharmacy database and patient information repository when a hard disk failure led them to discover that the backup tapes they had been consistently producing nightly for over two years were of the wrong files; no backups had ever been made of the lost data.
• A small insurance broker had a well defined process for nightly tape backups of data. The backup duties were delegated to an office junior who took tapes home for safe, offsite storage. When the firm suffered a data loss it was found that the backup tapes contained no useful data. Further investigation revealed that the tapes were being damaged by electromagnetic fields during the journey to the employee's home on an electrically powered train.
• A fifty-strong accountancy practice almost went out of business when their premises were destroyed by fire. This was not because they did not take backups but because it took nearly two weeks to find the key to a fireproof safe among the ashes of the building. Additionally, it was discovered that many of the tape backups were unusable since conditions within the fire resistant safe after prolonged exposure to heat could be compared to an oven.
• Scottish university lost 40 years of irreplaceable research as a result of a fire. Not one piece was backed up.
• A hundred-employee service organization was nearly put out of business when flooding of the area around their offices prevented access to their building. Although they had an off-site recovery plan, their only file backups were stored in the computer room.

The Competition
Most businesses know of tape backup of computer data and it is the most common method of data backup today.  Backup using tape technology requires a commitment to a media rotation and replacement plan - neither simple nor quick.

Even before implementing a complex tape backup process, it is necessary to analyse internal systems and decide how critical it would be if some data were lost, and how fast a system would need to be operational if the system did become damaged or inoperative.

Invariably someone needs to be given the job of managing the system - easy in a large company perhaps but still the job is mundane. But in a smaller company, there are no obvious choices of person. So often it is given to the office admin or MD to do - neither of who are motivated nor qualified. Perhaps they manage to replace the tape on a daily basis - but when it comes to restoring a critical lost file, it is usually chaos and panic.

For those who are interested here are some of the alternative tape rotation strategies available:

Full Image put onto a tape every day.  A different tape is passed through the system each day.  This ensures that a complete restore is possible with only one (or many) tape.  It works well for smaller servers with less than 1 Gigabyte of data and that do not need to be available 24 hours a day for operation.  For larger environments it is not practical and too disruptive.

Differential Backup is a variation on Full Image, where one tape that contains a full image of the system and further tapes store copies of the changes files only.  This allows a system recovery with just two tapes but is inefficient in its use of space.

Modified Backup is a variation on Differential Backup copying only the files that have changed since the last backup to the tape. This takes less time to backup each session and can be done several times during the day. The downside is that it requires more time to restore since files are spread over multiple tapes.

	Online 24x7	User in control	Instant access	Future Proof	Simple & Automatic	Support needed	Physical tapes	Capital expense	Waste of time
Online Backup
Tape System

Traditional backup
Current backup methods all involve the movement of data to storage media (tape, disk, etc) which suffer certain problems:

Ineffective - backups maybe done, but they may not have worked and rarely does anybody bother to check until it's too late.

Same Risk - tapes and disks are often stored in the same site as the original data - so easily damaged in the flood, fire, etc.

Damage - tapes and disks can become old, break, crack or be lost

Maintenance - without an unlimited supply of tapes, tape rotation is required. Tapes and tape readers need to be cleaned and maintained

Obsolescence - Technology advances mean that the system used to backup you data could easily be lost in the event of theft, disaster, etc.  Thus it needs to be replaced with a current system. The problem being that the new system is likely to be incompatible with the tapes that hold your vital data - a complete waste of time.

All this for a critical yet non-core business process.  Ask yourself the question "should I really have to deal with or worry about this?"