Recovery-in-a-Cave

Just got done reading the funniest white paper ever, from our friends at Iron Mountain. It asks the question, “…what happens when the devastation is so fierce that it hits the backups too? Don’t panic.”

Don’t panic? Really? I think you damn well better panic – about your career. You stashed your backup tapes so close to your primary data center that they got clobbered by the same natural disaster? C’mon man! Better update that resume.

And while we’re at it, why on earth are you still using tape? Iron Mountain, whose business is storing tape, points out just how fragile tape is:

“…if tapes suffer major temperature fluctuations every night, they will weaken and become more likely to snap. When your staff fails to maintain drive heads’ cleanliness, or cleans equipment incorrectly, tapes may be more prone to breaking. To avoid such problems, know the cleaning cycle and storage conditions recommended by your vendor.”

Snapping tapes? Drive head cleaning cycles? Fred Flintstone had to put up with this nonsense, but you do not.

The punch line comes at the end of this litany of All The Things That Can Go Wrong With Tape when IM reminds us that they have a nice, safe cave where you can stash your tapes. A cave? What is this, the Al Qaeda approach to disaster recovery? Do they use mules to get the tapes into the cave?

Look, disk-to-disk backup is mature; backup-to-the-cloud is mature; snapshotting, de-duplication, and virtualization are mature; and recovery-as-a-service (RaaS) is now mature. There is no excuse for backup to tape, and no excuse for sticking your tapes – and your company’s chances of recovery – in a cave.