On Sun, 20 Jun 2004 06:24:07 GMT, "Jolly Student"
wrote:

Ron:

Thank you for your words of wisdom. I personally like the fast no tape
system but the bug up my butt is that we dont have anything off site. If
you told me to get this or that and that its more reliable than tape, but
that I can TAKE IT OFF SITE, I dont care if it looks like a barbie lunchbox.
. . sign me up.

Jolly Student:

It seems you are complaining about two different issues at the company
you work with.
1) The necessity to make backups
2) The necessity to bring backups off site.


1) Why you have to make backups is easy to defend. Viruses, a fire in
the serverroom etc, software failures.
Raid controllers only protect you against hardware failures, which is
only about 20% of all outage causes. Human error and software failures
cause all other outage, which you have to protect against with
backups. Don't tell me that nothing happened in your company that you
can't use as an example of what might happen to your server.

But as Ron also said, that doesn't necessarily mean you need tapes.
Just any kind of backup that is suitable in the environment.


2) The case for bringing tapes off site is more difficult to defend.

I would consider taking the backups home with you a serious security
issue. Those tapes contain important data that someone might want to
steal. I assume that your office is better protected against burglars
than your home?

So you need to hire a company to collect the tapes, which can put it
in a safe place (underground bunker or something like that)

The question then is:
How costly is that solution
vs
What does losing all data cost your company and how likely is that
going to happen?


For a company in a 2 story building, a strong safe which is fireproof
might be a perfectly valid on-site location for your backups.
(I know of a dutch university that had the building with their
serverroom burn down to the ground, but after two days they could
collect access the safe in the ruins of the building and do a restore
on new servers).

The chance of an airplane hitting that building/safe is so small that
they don't need off-site backups.

On the 98th floor the situation is of course different. But you
haven't mentioned the situation of your own server.

Directors only care about money.
So what you need to do is show him that using off-site backups is the
cheaper solution in the long run.
If you cannot do that, then your boss is right.
If you can do that he can defend the expense to his boss and will
implement an off-site stragey.

Unfortunately most IT people are very bad at judging/calculating cost
effectiveness of software and hardware.

Marc