Data Backup

Why is backup important?

• More data at risk; very costly to replace
• Global data volumes are growing at 93% annually
• Critical data is dispersed over wide areas of an enterprise, no longer in a central place
  • Growing amount of data on servers and clients needs protection
• Network storage costing less than $1 per MB to purchase costs $8 per MB per year to manage
• Recreating lost PC LAN data costs
  • between $10K - $100K per incident

1998 statistics

Factors to Consider

• Volume of data to be backed up; where is it?
• Time window
• Tape hardware: capacity and performance
• Network bandwidth and the impact of other traffic
• Operator support available/desirable?
  • operators present or lights out?
  • protein robots?

Unattended Backup

• Automatic backups performed on a schedule configured by the administrator
• Allow for user-initiated ad hoc backups (restores?)
  • user interface???
• Tape library: media loading can be fully automated for both backups and restores
  • important for lights out operations
  • important for distributed sites
• Multiple platforms/operating systems

Types of Backup

• Full
• Incremental
• Differential