Sidebar: Backing Up the Backups

By Gary Anthes

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."

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