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Posts Tagged ‘data backup’

Tape backup is notorious for its inadequacy. It is unreliable, as its properties are dependable on human errors and technologically failures. Tapes are prone to mechanical, thermal and other kind of physical intervention, which can reduce their quality. The data recovery from tapes is only 60% true, as most information is lost due to the technical disadvantages. Tape backups can have slower recovery time than any other off-site backup driver. The potential threats that tapes can bring to the extraction of data is stronger than in any types of information containers. So, the next logical question to be posed here is why should rational businessmen or data admins depend on the inadequate tape systems? Offsite backup is much more reliable, faster and efficient, in comparison to the slow and old-fashioned tape backup.

Tapes have a technical annual failure in score of 1 to 12 percent. Due to this technical drawback, you should provide more tapes for containing information, as you can never be sure if they would work or would crack down. The multiple tapes that you will need for storing all the information will gradually ruin your budget, that’s why tape backup is often more expensive than offside backup, but it resumes its inadequate and slow working features nevertheless. The number of tapes that fail from either technical or administrative mistakes is estimated around 60 %. Just imagine the total budget for restoring the lost information: it will be enough to make your bankrupt!

But even more astonishingly, tape backups are still used today in many organizations, which are storing all their valuable files on mere tapes. The span that tapes are reliable is about a year: they tend to gradually decay and lose the stored information. Literally every user has experienced a tape deterioration when storing some files. Many end users are seriously disappointed when this happens to them , and start searching for other ways to protect their data. Some companies acquire daily backup regime, which is time and money consuming. Although it serves the requirements put by tape backups, it is highly stressing and can impede the daily regime of the enterprise. Tape backups are likely to have drawbacks, the same as disk . Using both methods is probably the best way to have your data protected.

Recovery procedures in the organizations cost a lot of time and money. You should think of all the things that can cause a disaster, and try to prevent them. You should either hire a security specialist, or make sure your network is protected, or even do both. A disaster recovery planning of a company can be a nerve racking experience for the new employees. The larger you organization is, the more data are likely to vanish into thin air (or network gaps). That’s’ why you should protect the system mainly from hackers , as well as from your own mistakes in file storage.
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Copyright 2006 Per Strandberg

This was a question that was recently put by forward on a TV consumer show. One guy had his hard disk crashed and lost all data. He was able to get his hard disk replaced because of a warranty.

To retrieve the data he had it sent to a data recovery company to get it recovered. The price tag was about $ 1500. But, he also wanted to have that extra cost covered by the same warranty.

I’m not a lawyer, but I believe it is quite clear that any warranty from any hard disk manufacturer doesn’t include restoration of data. That said, with the long life time and high durability of today’s hard disks they could very well afford this when it is caused by a hard disk failure.

As long as the hard disk only have a mechanical or electronic fault and it have not been exposed to water or fire the track record for restoring the data by a professional data recovery company is quite good. However, you have to expect to pay a chunk of money to have it restored. And you can never be 100 % sure they will succeed.

It’s always worthwhile to backup all your data or at least backup the data that is most important for you. This is the best warranty against data loss.

If you use the computer for leisure, playing games or surfing the Internet you may not need to take any backup at all. But today, more and more people store important document and information on their computers. Some store data vital to their professional life. This can be years of work such as academic thesis or it can be the content for a new book they are writing. Most people store at least some important information such as address books, emails, text documents, family pictures, music or company records.

Should you take backup? If so, what type of backup is best for you?

This all depends on: The value of the data if it becomes lost. The time it will take to recreate lost data. The cost to make the backup.
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Companies must account and deal for new legislation governing how information is stored on IT systems.

The EU is shortly to adopt many of the recommendations on corporate governance set out by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the US, UK firms are to be expected to deal with and manage explicit guidelines on how to store email and other documents on their IT systems. IT managers should consider the necessary procedures and technologies needed for compliance now, in order ensure technology is able to deal with the new legislation.

Regulations regarding data storage at the moment are fairly lax, but there will be a huge increase in the amount of data than must be held over the next 18 months to two years.

Email archiving, the increased use of expencive write-once read-many media, information lifecycle management and content-aware storage as a few of the technologies which firms should consider for the future, though in some cases companies will simply need to improve the way they manage existing systems.

It is anticipated that new legislations will demand that an organizations’ archiving solutions must guarantee that the information they hold has not been changed, and keep it for a specific period of time before automatically deleting it.

A survey of 493 companies in the UK has shown that compliance with regulations has a high or fairly significant impact on the data storage strategies of 87% of the organisations surveyed. Back-up and recovery was also very important to the data protection strategy of 93% of organisations.
78% of organisations future storage strategy is set to include Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape technology. This may be due to the highly affordable and flexible nature of this new technology. For example, recent deployments of disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) solutions by various companies have, on average, reduced the backup window by more than 70%, from fifteen hours to less than four, yielding significant time and cost savings in tape management.

Interestingly, product features were far more important than the brand of the product, with 82% of organisations making a decision based on product features. When it came to the decision of choosing a specialist storage supplier or a general IT provider for storage solutions there was a very slight preference for specialised storage suppliers (51%) over general IT providers (49%).
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