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Self-help Risk Factors
The fact that you are reading this means that you are probably already aware that your data and system are at risk from a variety of
known nasties. Fire, Theft, Burglary and Vandalism are the obvious ones, and close behind come Accidents, Hackers, Viruses and
Worms. Most people are now acutely aware of these risk factors and many of them take action to protect themselves. But it is often
the self-help measures which contain the hidden risks.
Magnetic Tape Drives
Many people purchase a Magnetic Tape Drive to perform backups but, as many of our clients have discovered to their cost, they are
not the attractive solution they may appear to be at first sight.
Tape Drives place a daily burden on management time in the form of an unbreakable routine. But what about holidays, sickness
etc? Will the backups be performed reliably? Not in our experience.
They have a dismal record of unreliability, fragile tape media and poor error reporting, and you only discover this when YOU try to
recover your data and find it’s not there.
If the data is there, and intact, restoration can be a very long and expensive process. A client recently paid his IT supplier more
than the original cost of the tape equipment to restore his database over four days. He was down for over a week.
Often the data is not encrypted as part of the writing process, which leaves the business operator vulnerable to civil and/or legal
action if tapes are lost and data misused.
Automated and Offsite
A similar argument can be made against all forms of self-help data backup. If they require intervention by a human being to be
effective, then they will fail at some time. Backups must take place under an automated system, and that system must be checked
daily to ensure that data has been copied correclty and is error-free. The data must be taken offsite, and it must be at least duplicated, preferably triplicated, in order to guarantee that it is available
when required.
Why take a Chance with your only Irreplaceable Asset?
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