There’s been quite a lot of news these days about great ways to ramp up High Availability systems while ignoring and/or removing the Backup solution sets that are in place already. While we here at Vision Solutions, Inc. fully condone the use of HA solution sets (and make the market leaders for Windows, Linux, AIX and AS/400), we believe that Backup is not a solution set to be cast out just yet. Today, we’ll look at the two top reasons why this is the case.
1 – Compliance issues. Legal departments and government regulations continue to require some method by which data is held outside of systems that end-users have direct access to. Traditionally this has meant tape backups that are held off-site, but modern backup solutions (such as Double-Take RecoverNow) can provide this user-shifted data storage on spinning disk instead. The goal of this type of backup is to make sure that if a user deletes data from a production machine (which would also delete it from the HA devices), there is still a copy of that data somewhere that can be used for discovery and compliance, held at various points-in-time.
2 – The “Whoops Factor.” Into every life, a little rain must fall. So too, into every data system, some bad data will fall. In order to protect against that bad data becoming the only data, you need a time-shifted version of the data held someplace safely. Backup tools allow you to keep this kind of time-shifted data, and if the backups are created and/or stored at another location, then even physical corruption can’t impact them. This gives you the ability to restore some or all information on-demand, in case your branch manager accidentally deletes the Users’ Home Directories store on your file server.
User- and time-shifting data aren’t the only reasons to keep up with Backup. There are many other reasons that your Backup tools should not be ignored or phased out. Quite the contrary, actually; Backup should be modernized right along with your HA solution sets, and used to meet the changing needs of your systems and users now and moving forward.
Filed under: Vision:101 Tagged: | backup, RecoverNow
