No Media Juggling



Traditional backups to external media are often called "unattended" but in reality require an operator to be on site.

Whether you use tapes, DVDs, or external hard drives, you are using media with limited capacity. Once the media is full, someone has to step in and put in a fresh tape.

This leads to one of two choices. You can run backups during the day when the IT staff is present, but this slows the server down while the backup process is running. Alternatively you can run the backup at night, which requires a night operator who often has nothing to do than watch the tapes spin.

With an online backup system, there is no media swapping. Your IT staff can start the backup before leaving for the evening and it will be finished by the next morning.

No Offsite Storage

The second step to traditional backups involves moving the media offsite to a secure location. This could be another company building or a secure vault.

This requires either having company personnel or a courier physically transport the tapes to the offsite location. Time or money has to be spent to get the tapes where they need to go, and more time or money to get them back if you want to restore.

Offsite storage also means that when you do need to restore, you can't do so quickly. Someone has to run and get the tapes from storage before any needed files can be read and this can add hours to the restore job.

Remote backups over the internet mean that your data is automatically off site. It may not even be in the same city so is well protected from any disaster that might damage data at your company location.

Restoring from remote backups is as easy as restoring from tapes in the same room. You have access to your backups instantly any time you need the information.

Local Backups Are Still Important Tools

Traditional media backups haven't been made obsolete by remote backups. They are still an important component of your overall disaster plan.

One downside to remote backups is that if your internet connection goes down, you don't have access to your archives. If you have tape backups, either onsite or offsite, you have an alternative source if you need to do a restore at short notice.

The best recovery plan has multiple layers of protection, so a combination of online file storage with media storage provides the best safety net in case of data loss.