In reality, most hard disks seldom see operating temperatures below the chill of a server room or beyond the warmth of rack space, and most disks will not commit an URE that crashes a RAID-5 rebuild. While it is agreed that better parity schemes exist, the exception is not the rule. My customer could have retained cold storage data to individual disks via removable drives, with no redundancy at all. In fact, most organizations already use a single removable disk or cloud container for their nightly backup routine. My customer choose a special backup appliance that fits three disks into a single cartridge, further protecting archived data and proving RAID-5 still has business applications.
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As the size of information stored in the cloud grows increasingly larger, IT managers must plan on getting data out of the cloud when it’s critically needed during disaster recovery. For some businesses, the cloud is a place to deposit a second copy of data already retained locally. For others the cloud is primary storage, where unique data is created and modified. Problems arise in both cases: when local data is lost due to fire, flood, or theft, when the data is too large for a timely transfer across limited Internet bandwidth, or when a cloud provider shuts down. This all begs the question: is redundant data in place?
Not long ago network administrators would backup their data to tape storage, and later onto hard disks. As managed service providers evolved with technology, IT professionals began replicating to the cloud. Online storage services such as Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, DreamHost DreamCloud, and Dropbox became popular destinations for offsite data retention. It seemed like such a good idea at the time, since local disks were small and cloud servers were large. Storage technology has continued to improve, and 8TB hard disk drives are now available for local retention. As free space has increased on servers, so have the storage needs of its users. Internet bandwidth has not kept up with improvements in storage technology, and slow speeds or high prices have made it necessary to “reverse cloud” backup data from online containers to local disks.
Many IT professionals are starting to think about how to backup Amazon S3 for local retention – i.e. how to do reverse cloud backup. If you’ve wondered how to backup from Amazon S3 buckets to disk so that there is a high speed local copy of cloud data, the NetSwap Plus product might be for you. While several cloud to cloud backup services exist, they have the disadvantage of incurring additional monthly fees and lower performance of the cloud.
How do you provide backup protection from Cryptolocker? This virus has the potential to not only lock you out of your server files, but potentially encrypt files located at network shares as well. Which means it could have devastating impact on backup data hosted on a local backup appliance if you keep the backup data online…