Editor’s Opinion: Backup Is Dead

Why do we need to copy twice the primary data of our computer(s) for security, once time on-site and another time off-site? One is enough. Backup today has no more interest. We only need replication.

Formerly, backup was needed because organizations wanted to be sure to guarantee rapidly business continuity in case of failure. And some of them also duplicated their data outside in case of disaster in their offices (fire, earthquake, deluge).

But now, we have better Internet bandwidth and new storage technologies that permit to directly and rapidly backup updated data in another place. If you use CDP, de-dupe based on blocks – and not files – (adding encryption for security), you finally have very small storage capacity to transfer: only the updated blocks of your HDDs, this number of blocks being limited by CDP and de-dupe, and their size with compression. Only big companies are updating daily more than 100MB of files, and de-dupe only can reduce this amount with standard ratio of 20:1.

The only problem happens when you are launching replication for the first time and when you need to recover your entire system, as it will take a huge time to transmit all these data to and from an offsite location.

Note that the problem is the same with backup even it’s much faster with a good 1Gb and now 10Gb Ethernet network.

For big entities, we can understand a need of onsite backup, but why to do it for all the data, and not only for the critical applications and files. You can wait for few hours for the other ones, then saving a lot of backup capacity.

It’s not a big challenge for SMBs and consumers to realize their first backup on one or several disk drives at home, and then transport these devices where they will realize the replication, the same operation being done in the other direction for recovery. It’s exactly what is – or was – done with tapes using a transport company.

If your computer is done, the time to buy another one will be about the same as the time to go to your replication site, duplicate yours disks and come back to fix them into your new machine. If the problem is a virus, files being deleted by accident, an error in software programming, etc., you generally have to recover a part of your data, not all of them, and can get them directly online from your replication site.

If you’re unlucky enough to have a fire, an earthquake or a deluge, your customers will easily understand a few hours of computer discontinuation.

In the end, it’s a lot if savings in hardware to have to copy your data only once, not twice. With cloud storage, it could even be much cheaper. Forget definitively backup for replication only.