Backup Planning

In New Orleans we learned there are two kinds of levees. There are those that have failed and those that will fail. Don't let your backups be like a New Orleans levee. If you don't have a backup plan you need one. Running regular backups is a good thing. Continuous backups are better. Running continuous backups to an offsite storage facility is the ultimate.

Most backup plans need to be able to accomplish two distinct purposes:

1. Recovery of specific files to a point in time is often overlooked but is the most useful part of a backup plan.
   
2. Running a once in a lifetime full recovery to an off site computer (after your office is stranded by rising floodwater, this has to work right the first and hopefully the only time.)

	Cloud Backups
	Lots of companies are now offering cloud or network based backup of your data. You install a small client program on your server. The service uses your bandwidth to keep their copy of your data in sync. Security and deduplication of data to preserve your telecom resources become significant considerations.
	Drobo goes beyond RAID
	Simple, scalable, reliable Drobo network attached storage allows you to keep up to 12TB of data in a redundant array of inexpensive 2TB disk drives. Drive failures are detected and can be healed by simply pulling the broken device and inserting a new one. Drobo employs multiple RAID models especially 1,5 and 6 dynamically based on the data and storage devices present.
	NetApps FAS2020
	Do you need to manage hundreds of terabytes? SAN is the enterprise technology for the storage problem. No matter how many bytes you have it won't be enough unless your management strategy is as sophisticated as the device itself. Combined with de-duplication SAN offers a solution to enterprise storage requirements.