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Why Do Companies Backup So Infrequently?
Orome1 writes "Businesses are on average backing up to tape once a month, with one alarming statistic showing 10 percent were only backing up to tape once per year, according to a survey by Vanson Bourne. Although cloud backup solutions are becoming more common, still the majority of companies will do their backups in-house. Sometimes they will have dedicated IT staff to run them, but usually it's done in-house because they have always done it like that, and they have confidence in their own security and safekeeping of data."
Indeed. My own [small place of business] does its backups this way with Acronis:
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Every day, a drive is plugged in.
Every evening, an incremental backup is performed on that drive that is consistent with whatever the backup drive already had on it. (It just takes a few minutes for Acronis to get this done.)
After that it is removed and taken off-site. A different drive is plugged in the following day.
Fridays are special, in that the drive gets automagically erased, and a full backup is performed mid-day. But then the evening incremental ritual is the same as any other day of the week.
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Losing a backup disk is, at most, 24 hours worth of loss, and only then if it is coincident with losing the main system.
FWIW: We use the cheapest 2.5" laptop drives available, in the cheapest bus-powered 2.5" USB enclosures we can get our hands on (I think the last round of them cost us $5, each). And we test our backups randomly, whenever the accountant decides he wants to see what things looked like last week/last year. Acronis then cheerfully does a bare-metal restore from [random backup drive] onto our spare server-box, with 100% success.
Now: We're not a media company. We don't have tens of TB of changing data to back up on a daily basis. But most other small(ish) companies don't either...
Who needs tapes?
Kid-proof tablet..
Perhaps for *very* small businesses with not much data, or where the restore time is not a critical factor.
Even with our 32Mbit connection at work it would take about 40 hours in transfer time alone to get our data "out of the cloud" in a disaster scenario. (And part of that bandwidth would still be needed to keep other operations running, so it might even take longer) You can perhaps make small, incremental backups into the cloud, but when you need the data in an emergency you need it as fast as possible. Restore from tape took two hours. (We had a chance to do it "for real" earlier this year ;-P )
Or for small businesses in the developing world, where you pay $100 a month for 4Mbit/s (South Africa) and the fastest connection is 10Mbit/s but only available with usage based billing, stick to tapes or hard drives. The cloud is just too damn slow, or too damn expensive.
There are many different backup strategies depending on what you are backing up and if your backups are designed for disaster recovery or archival of data.
Making some presumptions here to answer your questions:
They use a rotation of 5 or (7 drives if including weekends). Monday's drive is always the same, as is Tuesdays, Wednesday, etc. Each drive is kept offsite and only that day's drive is brought onsite while others remain offsite, or are taken back offsite.
If on Thursday the server goes down, they just request Wednesday's drive for the restore. If that backup was unsuccessful or the drive just happened to fail, then they lose Wednesday's business and go back to Tuesdays. Repeat until they get a successful restore.
Fridays basically are not an incremental backup. Well, the evening is, but the midday backup is a full backup and then is incrementally updated from the 1/2 day of business that night.
With this scheme, they can't restore a backup from a year ago. Depending on what is being backed up, they may not have to go back a year. Accounting information for instance from a year ago may be in the current backup set. If you are looking to restore something that was corrupted or deleted at an unknown point and wouldn't be in the current backup, then it would just take 1 disk out of the rotation once a month for instance and replace it with a new drive. A previous company I worked for recommend this strategy with point of sale systems we sold. We gave them a box of 10 backup tapes. 6 nightly backup tapes and 4 weekly tapes. The weekly tapes were in a 4-week rotation while the nightly were in a 1 week rotation. If they wanted to do a monthly rotation they could purchase additional tapes.
The $5 wasn't for the drive, it was for the enclosure and/or drive adapter.