Why are backups important?

24. Jul, 2009 1 Comment

backups I’ve spent over 17 years working in the backup space starting out as an evening ‘Tape Jockey’ contracting for Digital Equipment Corporation. I’ve heard over that time that the profession of administrating a backup environment was “the most important job that no one wants”. This concept has held true for a long time and has also intrigued me as to why people have shied away from it. From a near primal approach if data is worth being saved to disk then assuredly it’s worth making a copy of. Hasn’t everyone lost something thought to be saved and would like it brought back?

Now to say that you need to have the meeting minutes from last Tuesday, which were of course accidently deleted, back before this week’s agenda shows you missed an actionable item is obvious. On the surface restores from these backups can keep the day to day business running since having information readily at hand can mean the difference. When you pull back a layer you find that there are far more corporate and legal reasons for keeping and being able to access information over the long term. These include government regulatory requirements based on the type of business and data that is being protected. There are also binding agreements with customers and clients that warrant the retention of data.

The how to retain data, for what retention periods, and the need to bring it back will be topics of future blog postings. If you’re a backup person or are just interested the art, stay tuned for more details from nearly two decades of living it.

-Richard Witherow, GlassHouse Senior Consultant