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October 24, 2005

Backup Doesn't Matter -- Recovery Does

Backup can mean a lot of different things in a lot of different companies. Some companies see backup as a DVD or two put in a case. Other companies have huge servers that house everyones data and call that backup. So, what is the real purpose of backup? In the busy hour to hour market, people sometimes lose focus as to what original intentions were. With backup the most important part is recovery. To quote Ray Paquet from a recent interview: "I don't care if you can back my data up or not. I only care if you can recover it. Backup doesn't matter." You can back all your data up into DVD's or tape drives and place them in safe places, but if it takes a month to get the data back to where it needs to be there can be a major problem. In some cases it becomes cheaper and more efficient to just recreate the data manually than to spend the time mulling over the backup archives. There are a few solutions that make sense. Replicating the data can help in most solutions, but it can still be a major problem. What happens when the data on your corporate laptop gets corrupted and it gets replicated back to the server? Now your replication archive is no longer usable! A great way to ensure your data is quickly recoverable is to have a central repository of data with revision control that gets fully backed up in the usual way (DVD's, tapes, etc.). If data goes bad, it takes one reload of the data to get everyone (no matter where they work from) back up and running. Now that is a quick recovery!

Posted by on October 24, 2005 04:33 PM

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