World Backup Day 2021

Started 10 years ago and always March 31, the World Backup Day continues to exist to raise awareness, essentially consumers up to experts, that data protection is an essential mission for everyone. As of today, again 30% of IT users don’t do any backup, 30% of people live on the edge, probably ignore risk or believe in extra forces to protect them. We continue to see projects without any budget for data protection as developers or admin believe in other mechanisms.

At that time, many users started to buy and connect individual disk to copy their critical data with without a backup tool. In fact the main idea is explicit here with the creation of several copies, versions or images and protect yourself finally. Yes your data protection also contributes to your health especially for data everyone keep on its phone. For enterprise, it is the health of the company, its business, its sustainability.

Losing data from a stupid human error is pretty common, suffer from an hardware issue is also common or more generally be impacted by a virus is classic as well. Families extend their digitalization effort, open doors with sharing capabilities and above all create lots of data. It’s pretty common to have a home NAS server with a few dozen of terabytes And how do you protect all these data? and all data distributed on all your laptops? and your phone with your photos…? Same thing for enterprises especially during recent months as remote works or WFH explode and expose potentially the enterprise not yet ready for such massive remote jobs, data transit and applications usages.

The first negative behavior is people themselves as they always forget to backup their data, thinking that problems touch others until the issue arrives on their desk. Hum, “my laptop doesn’t reboot, I lost these files, these files are corrupted...”. And at that time they cry…

The other reason is that users refuse to buy hardware as a redundant device to store the same data. And this mistake is something we see very often. We just saw an external USB3 5TB Seagate drive at Costco for $90 meaning that the terabyte costs only $18 or 57GB for just $1. Storage is cheap, at least this category so don’t hesitate again, your data has by far more value than that.. And it’s just an example but it can save time, data and headache… against many issues. Among all these risks, cyber attacks are a reality and it’s now a matter of “when” rather than “if”. Beyond trojan horse, logic bomb, worm… ransomware is probably the hotest one, and prevent a serious impact by creating redundant copies of data is paramount with the notion of air gap, that necessity to disconnect and establish a clear separation between online and offline copies. Of course for such need, tape is one of the media for such requirement being passive by mature and also without few energy need.

Recent disasters were terrible for the provider of course but above all for all people who had data there suffering of a deep impact with real consequences. Speaking specifically about OVHcloud, the fire started 3 weeks ago, 21 days ago, 504 hours ago. We wrote a few days ago an article on lessons we can learn from that and it would be good if such big issue could serve as a trigger for people to always include a backup plan.

Beyond these comments, it appears important to mention some trends around data protection, especially all techniques that help to align the answer to the need i.e find the right solution aligned with RPOs and RTOs. Of course there are snapshot, continuous data protection, RAID, mirroring (RAID-1), erasure coding, replication, tape copy, vaulting or things like data reduction, encryption. And of course the cloud changed a lot of things, from how people buy IT to how they consume IT.

At the enterprise level, to put things in perspective over the last 3 decades, data protection has successfully embraced client server with horizontal multi-tier backup to protect bare metal machines and associated applications, databases… We all remember NetBackup or Networker from many vendors (CDC, OpenVision, Veritas for NBU and EMC and Dell for NW) but also Commvault, TSM (WDSF evolution into ADSM then TSM – T for Tivoli – to now IBM Spectrum Protect) or even Atempo started as Quadratec with Time Navigator in 1992. This trajectory got extended with the server virtualization as VMware and a few others like XenSource actively promoted. It created some new needs and new companies, the most visible is probably Veeam in that space.

Cloud has its own place a bit transversal to this evolution. Container and Kubernetes radically changed the backup world once again and established players even ones who target perfectly the VM world had difficulty to fill the gap quickly. We saw some movements like the acquisition of Kasten by Veeam. SaaS is the last attribute of the data protection recent wave both as a behavior of the product and applications they need to protect such Salesforce, Workday, Office365, Google Docs, Box, etc. A few names popup here are HYCU, Clumio, OwnBackup and Spanning. Open source also plays a key role during all these 3 decades and you can find some interesting alternative products to protect your data.

So make copy of your data, don’t hesitate, multiple of these, it will save your digital life, and much more.