The Importance of Data Backup

This is why he notes that for any backup software to be successful it must be "easy to use and it must be able to remove as many of the normal processes as possible".

Going further and from a company-wide perspective, whatever software a business uses for its backup requirement "it must allow the business to run efficiently and it must run automatically and anonymously in the background".

Multiple Layers

Backups can have an unintentional consequence. That is, the huge increase in the amount of data that now needs to be stored. In fact, the amount of data increase can easily reach unmanageable proportions. However, there are products that overcome this problem. Shane Moore, product marketing manager of EMC, says that what his company offers is data de-duplication, which is a "unique and different way of doing backups". Typically, says Moore, EMC uses a 300:1 compression ratio in its Avamar backup software, thereby overcoming the problem of creating extra and massive data increases. Moore notes that data protection does not have to be complex, just "robust".

Jacob Van Der Eyk, Computer Associate’s (CA) customer solutions architect, says there are many layers in the reality of data storage. "These multiple layers include the software layer and the hardware layer, along with processes and infrastructure."

He says that from a CA perspective, there are two ways to prepare for an IT catastrophe. There is the traditional or standard backup which is managed and policy-driven, and requires certain processes to kick in. The other way is by using CDP. This, says Van Der Eyk, is where we are no longer talking about backup, but rather a solution that is used by the bigger end of town—continuous data protection. He notes that this system works by "replicating and copying the system and then just monitoring the deltas [changes]. This way, the amount of data does not increase to exponential levels and the company’s computer network isn’t slowed down to a crawl."

According to companies such as Sony, the future for backup storage is getting brighter all the time. Vincent Bautista, product manager for Storage, Sony Australia, says that "backing up using new methods like Blu-ray is also starting to get a look-in, particularly for personal backup. Blu-ray can store up to 50GB per single-sided disc—this is five times the capacity of DVD. Whichever method you use, data backup must be taken seriously. Unfortunately, many learn the hard way by only realising backup after they suffer from data loss or disasters".