Online Backup vs. Tape Backup?

hashbox asks: "I work for a small non-profit (about 100 staff members) and management has decided that they want to use an online data backup system instead of our existing tape backup system. After a meeting with one of the many vendors providing this service, I must admit that I am impressed with the promise of the technology (ease of use etc). However the sysadmin side of me has a few reservations. Has anyone here on Slashdot used an online backup service, and what were your experiences?"

Comments

Re:Watch those terms...

[DLWormwood]

You're not really in the market for a backup system; you're in the market for a restore system.

Amen. I'm working on a project involving management of multimedia assets, and one key part of the functionality is to archive and restore old artwork. My project leader and other stakeholders went through half a dozen providers, and they kept coming back to the same problem. They all stored data that was handed to them, but none of them provided an easy or programmable means of restoring that data. It seems backup providers seem to think that data restoration is a manual, labor-intensive process when for our needs we required it to be done on an automated, systematic basis. (We have much more data than we have capacity to keep accessable, hence a regular archive/restore cycle for many projects.)