Backup: A Pain or Necessity?

By Ole Gjerde

Backing up your files may be a pain, but you should always consider it

Backup. What does that word mean to you?

Does it remind you of something you should be doing, but are not?

Or maybe it reminds you about the extreme annoyance of having to swap tapes every day? It used to be that the only option for backups was the good old tape drive. The tapes would hold anywhere from just a few GB up to 1-200GB. They worked OK, but certainly it was and is a bit of a hassle to have to change tapes every day.

Are tapes the only option? Absolutely not!

Media Type: Tapes
Using standard backup software to back up to tapes.
Pros: Easy to take off-site Easy to keep archival backups	Cons: Tapes must be swapped Can be unreliable Can wear out and need to be replaced
Media Type: Disk-to-Disk
Using standard backup software (like tapes) to back up to another hard drive rather than to tape.
Pros: Fast (Both backup and restore)	Cons: Hard to take off-site Hard to keep archival backups
Media Type: Imaging
Uses software to upload all your files to an off-site server, usually using some kind of encryption for security.
Pros: Very fast restore (Can even restore to different hardware)	Cons: More difficult to restore individual files Difficult to keep archival backups Difficult to take off-site
Media Type: Online
Uses software to upload all your files to an off-site server, usually using some kind of encryption for security.
Pros: Easy to take off-site (All data is stored off-site)	Cons: Slow backup and restore Hard to back up ALL data this way

So which one is the right one for your company?

It depends on what’s important. If you want to get back up and running after a complete server crash, imaging may be the best one. If you just want to keep files for a long time, tapes may be the right one. Ultimately, a combination of two or more of the options are generally going to be the best solution.

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