This is the first of three posts we’ll do on a data/workload protection & recovery model we call Three Phase Workload Recovery.

One of the big old players in backup software recently announced that they will “blur the lines between backup and archive,” by automatically aging backups to an archive. If your perspective is that of the old-school backup mindset, this probably sounds like progress.

If you’ve been following us for a while, you know that we like to emphasize the small, “every day” disasters that are so common yet so easy to overlook, like the fried power supply or the accidentally deleted file. The ones where you don’t need to declare a disaster and failover to a remote site, but instead need a local replica of your data and workloads you can spin up in a couple of minutes.

In this third and final installment, we examine the various methods of data protection, and come back to our favorite topic, testing…