Taking a layered approach to your backup
I received a call from a customer last week who was using tapes to backup their small business. They only had a few PCs and a server to backup and were backing up weekly as well as taking the tapes offsite.
I was glad to hear that they actually had a strategy and that they were taking their backup offsite. Its most likely these tapes actually sat in the boot of the car which really isn’t recommended given its Summer in Australia and your car could get stolen. It seems many people do this with their hard drives too. The have 2 and swap them every few days or week taking one home or keeping it in the boot of the car. Given the high rate of hard drive failure keeping them in a warm boot isn’t really the most sensible thing to be doing.
The business or the person managing these tapes had become a little tired of the process and was looking for something easier and cheap (cost effective is the word we like to use). So during a brief conversation they asked several questions about how Carbonite worked and seemed to be comfortable with what Carbonite had to offer.
They mentioned stopping the use of tapes altogether and only using Carbonite as the sole backup method. I always get a little worried when I hear this. Not that Carbonite can’t handle the responsibility. Its more about that word “Backup Strategy” and swapping from one backup method to the next to save time and money isn’t really improving the strategy at all.
In a small business environment when your livelihood depends on having that system information always accessible, risking that data with one form of backup is NOT RECOMMENDED. I encouraged her to continue with the tapes or at least consider another form of local backup using hard drives or similar and then having Carbonite as a remote backup service.
They didn’t have a lot of data, 20GB in total I think and retrieving all of this using Carbonite would have been fine and potentially only taken a day or so. My concern was in relation to relying on one form of backup only. Having a layered approach is best, where you combine local and remote to give you real peace of mind.
Relying on any one form of backup is dangerous because sometimes software can fail, more often than not, user error can cause a process to go wrong, particularly when it isn’t tested regularly.
I always encourage users of Carbonite to check regularly enough that their backups are OK. Carbonite will error if it isn’t working and it will tell you if the internet connection has failed. The same principle applies with external drives. You need to check them regularly. Even if you are using an application to run your backups automatically. You should regularly check that its actually doing what you are expecting to. If you aren’t you might just be in for a rude surprise when you eventually do check.
