Putting together an almost fool-proof backup plan

Data backup is one of the most lucrative slices in the storage markets. Research Outfit IDC reckons that Online backup itself will be worth $715 million by 2011, representing a compounded annual growth rate of 33 percent

Backup is big business because more and more revolves around business service processes which generate a great amount of data and also due to legal requirements enacted by governments and regulating bodies compel businesses to keep track of every byte they produce.


Backup? What’s that?

Before planning for a backup plan, let's make sure we actually understand what backup means. Wikipedia defines backup as "the copying of data so that these additional copies may be restored after a data loss event".

People tend to confuse between backup and archiving and while similar, they are altogether two different beasts.

Backup is always a copy of something else whereas, archiving might be describe as the process of organising your least used data.

In effect, you can create a backup of an archive while archiving a backup would not be of much use.