Ads by TechWords

See your link here
Receive the latest technology news and information.
Security
Computerworld Daily News (First Look and Wrap-Up)
Computerworld Blogs Newsletter
The Weekly Top 10
Cloud Computing
View all newsletters




Privacy Policy
 

Sidebar: Backing Up the Backups

August 1, 2005 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - One company that would seem to have all its backup bases covered is Auto Warehousing Co., which has computer facilities in 28 North American locations.
A disaster led the company to move from tapes to more-reliable DVDs for backup. Instead of rotating backup tapes, as procedures called for, an operations manager at one of the company's data centers had just kept copying over the same tape each night, until it eventually wore out. "We had a catastrophe on that server, and when we went to restore the backup from that tape, we were unable to read it," recalls CIO Dale Frantz.
Here's what the company does now:

  • It copies all production data nightly to disk on backup file servers.

  • It encrypts and writes the same data to DVDs -- about 50 a day -- making two copies of each. It sends the DVDs to 28 off-site locations using its employees.

  • Once per month, the company ships a set of the DVDs to the home office in Tacoma, Wash., for verification and testing. Other DVDs are shredded as they cycle out of use.

  • Once per month, Auto Warehousing transmits encrypted backup data to the home-office data center over a private network. The data remains there for 30 days, providing disaster recovery capability.

"We had a site struck by lightning that took out the power protection, the [uninterruptible power supplies] -- everything we had -- and damaged both the primary and backup servers," Frantz says. "But we could recover from the DVDs."


Jump to comments

Security

Additional Resources

WHITE PAPER
Approximately 60 percent of data migration projects overrun time or budget, while some fail completely. Download this white paper, "Enhancing Your Chance for Successful Data Migration," to learn the critical steps you need to take to execute a data migration project with minimum cost and risk to your business.
WHITE PAPER
Read the Gartner research note to learn why the TCO of a server-based computing deployment used to deliver all applications to users is around 50% lower than that of an unmanaged desktop deployment.
WHITE PAPER
Economic downturns have a tendency to accelerate emerging technologies, boost the adoption of effective solutions, and punish solutions that are not cost competitive or that are out of synch with industry trends. This IDC White Paper presents the results of an IDC survey of 330 companies in Western Europe, Asia/Pacific and the Americas that measures the receptiveness to Linux and takes into consideration changing views driven by the disruptive economic environment that businesses face today.

White Papers & Webcasts

Share our Strength
Download Now  

Managing Secure File Transfer to Save Time, Money and IT Resources
Learn how companies are using innovative technology to overcome these challenges and improve user productivity by offloading e-mail attachments and replacing FTP with...

Security Convergence Equals Network Security Cost Savings
Listen to IBM Internet Security Systems' take on network security convergence.

Disaster Recovery 2008: Reduced Costs and Improved Performance
How long can your Enterprise afford to be without your data? With an accelerated disaster recovery program, you never have to answer this...