Re: Off-site backups
The Iron mountain trucks have got smaller, we went from large open reel tapes to 3490 cartridges then LTO but the majority of the space in the truck was boxes and boxes of paper. The amount of paper has reduced radically year on year and may soon disappear altogether.
Even with mirrored data centre running visualised servers constantly snapshotting still like to know I can get back to a known state and tape can be a huge help here. If you run a complex workload with an ERP system at the core and a number of Line of Business systems feeding it you are actually running a very complicated distributed database and managing restore points across all those applications can be tricky. getting back to a know state after a database corruption then being able to control the roll forward gives greater potential for a recovery without significant data loss. It is the nightmare scenario but in health, social care or regulated industries it does need planning for.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
