This is possibly the single most important question you should ask when reviewing your technology. A recent study discovered that, of companies experiencing a “major loss” of computer records, 43 percent never reopened, 51 percent closed within two years of the loss, and a mere 6 percent survived over the long-term.[1] It is crucial to assess your backups regularly to ensure that you have appropriate protection for your business.

Tape, historically the backup medium of choice, is rapidly being phased out in favor of disk-based options for very good reason. Anybody who’s previously used VCR tapes, but now has a disk based DVR (such as TiVo) to record their favorite TV shows, can appreciate that the disk-based system is simpler, faster, and more reliable.  The difference between tape backup and a good disk-based backup is just as striking. Given that we are talking about your critical business data, can you afford anything less than a good disk-based backup?

I feel it’s important to clarify the difference between a good disk-based backup system and a bad one. Simply using existing tape backup software and replacing the tape drive with a disk drive is not really a good solution, particularly for ensuring rapid recovery in case of fire, theft or other disaster.

There are three fundamental categories of disk-based backup: local disk, cloud (internet disk), and hybrid (local disk and internet disk). Cloud-based or internet-based solutions are disk-based solutions which encrypt and store backup files at remote data centers.

Backups can be performed to local disk drives with secondary backup copies on portable USB drives that are physically rotated off-site. This is a good solution, but it requires manual off-site rotation of USB drives. Cloud (or internet) backups automatically send your backup data off-site via your internet connection. Unfortunately, there are four key issues with the cloud-only backup: (1) network performance problems can cause your backups to lag behind, particularly when large changes occur; (2) it can take a very long time to restore a significant amount of data; (3) many cloud solutions cannot handle complex restorations efficiently (such as Exchange mailbox restore or a bare-metal server restore in case of severe failure); and (4) you are placing a great deal of faith in the cloud provider’s backup solution as your sole backup.

For the above reasons, I believe that a hybrid solution is ideal. A good hybrid solution will allow you to make local backups to disk and give you the option to make a secondary off-site copy via the internet. Hybrid solutions can perform the initial backup “seeding” via physical hard drive so that only incremental changes are sent over your internet connection. All restores should be able to be done locally, but an off-site copy of the data exists in the case that the primary storage and primary backup are stolen or destroyed due to water or fire.