The answer comes on three layers. First, you can manually back it up or you could take a plunge into the cloud.

That’s fine and good for something like a simple hardware failure, but what about the case of catastrophic failure such as flood or a fire? Most of the talk has revolved around cloud storage.

Cloud backup has it’s pluses and it’s minuses. First of all, it’s slow. Even with today’s broadband capabilities found in many households, upload speeds are still relatively slow. According to ofcom the national average upload speed is a mere 230kbps.

Second, it can be costly and have recurring fees. I have all of my family photos stored online and pay around £4/month in storage and monthly access fees. I can’t even imagine how expensive it would be to also store all of my music and videos there (or how long it would take to transfer).

Third, many people take issue with storing personal data in the cloud, sure the data is encrypted, but it’s still stored on someone else’s system. Who knows when the day will come that some hacker breaks in and looks at photos of me drunk at a party. I don’t see this happening any time soon, but some people do. Of course, I don’t think the moon landing was fake and some people do (you know who you are).

Alex

The gospel of disk has been preached for so long now that disk seems to be the inevitable choice for backup technology. But insiders throughout the tech world say there still are plenty of reasons to backup with tape.

Mainly this is for security and how well each form factor can ultimately survive while being moved around. The USB disk should perhaps be the most concerning, ultimately a basic USB disk, if lost can be plugged into anyones PC and restored. A tape on the other hand requires the same drive, and the password to restore. As far as portability goes, a tape is inert, has no electronics in side and can survive a harsher life than its USB hard disk counterpart.

Fragile disk inside, NOT FOR PORTABLE USE

You need to ask what you are actually protecting against,

said Frank Westerheim, president of a technology services company.

Maybe a small business is backing up data ‘just-in-case,’ keeping files locked in a vault or taking off site as part of a daily backup routine on the off chance they might be needed down the road, Westerheim explained. Or a business might virtually mirror a whole system every night in order to restore data and applications immediately in case of disaster.

Two Different Needs, Two Different Solutions

Suppose a small business wants to protect its data and intellectual property. The company may never look at these archived items again, but they still need to keep them just in case. Tape is still the way to go for this kind of deep archiving. It’s cheap, easy to handle, secure, inert, and it can be stored safely in a vault off premises.

Backing up to hard disk, on the other hand, fulfills a different need.

The fundamental question is: What are your restore or recovery objectives?

said Barry Hammond, Director of sales and marketing at a Data Protection Solution company.

“All a tape does is store data, whereas a virtualised backup can take a complete image of your OS, your settings and your applications,” Hammond said. Provided the company has invested in the software to take virtual snapshots or ‘virtualise’ in the first place then a disk fills this kind of backup need. And there’s no reason these different types of backup can’t coexist.

There is also the question of speed, Many small companies have cheap off the shelf portable USB hard drives designed for single personal us, not for Enterprise backup.

Using this type of media has speed and throughput implications.

Hammond said. Do you want your backup to complete in one night? Tape drives have evolved to become very fast; for example, the recently released LTO-5 is capable of writing at 280 MBps (assuming 2:1 compression) which will outperform disk by a long way, particularly as cheaper lower-tier disk such as USB/SATA is normally chosen for backup. They will also hold more. LTO5 Has a native capacity of 1.5tb and a compressed maximum of 3tb. And with LTO 6, 7 & 8 planned with a total backup capacity of 12.8tb or 25tb compresses its certainly not going away.

Welcome, then, to the same old balancing act. The pundits may have promised that disk storage would solve all your problems, but nothing’s ever that simple — especially technology. Tape and disk both have their respective virtues, and depending on your needs it is entirely possible that you’ll ultimately find that an tape based archive is the start and progressing to disk based snapshots when budget allows.

Source from Engadget.com

In an apparent attempt to solidify its standing in the corporate world, RIM has unveiled a new platform that allows IT specialists to more tightly manage company devices — even those from rival manufacturers like Apple and Android. With the BlackBerry Mobile Fusion software, announced this morning, companies will be able to set up rules governing employee passwords apps and other software across a variety of smartphones and tablets, including the iPhone, iPad and Android handsets. 

The system also allows managers to remotely wipe and lock any devices that go missing or stolen, potentially bringing enhanced security to a workplace that’s become increasingly fragmented. “Our customers have been saying, ‘We’re moving to these different adoption models, and we’d like you on board with that,’” said Alan Panezic, vice president for enterprise product management, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. Slated to launch during the first quarter of next year, Mobile Fusion represents RIM’s first foray into the multi-platform management market, and may expand even further to encompass Windows Phone devices, as well. Compatible with BlackBerry OS and BBX, Mobile Fusion will also allow users to remotely manage PlayBooks from BlackBerry handsets, though that won’t happen until February, when the tablet finally receives a software update. No word yet on pricing, but Panezic says it will be “competitive” with the market.

Splitsec currently provides software, hardware, and I.T. services to many public and private schools around the UK. This award from VMware places Splitsec as one of only a handful of resellers to receive this status and allows for a higher satisfaction to all current and future academic clients.

Further, effective August 16, 2011, academic clients must ONLY come to resellers with VMware’s Academic Specialisation in order to receive access to Academic SKUs and pricing.

Splitsec is pleased to have received this status and looks forward to providing an even higher level of service to its academic customers with this new VMware Academic Specialisation. For more information regarding how Splitsec might help your academic program please contact us.

Almost three-quarters of firms and public sector organisations across nine European countries may not fully recover their computer systems or data after an IT failure, a survey suggests.

The report by IT group EMC said 74% were “not very confident” they could fully restore their networks.

It also found that 54% admitted they had lost data or suffered systems downtime in the past 12 months.

A total 1,750 IT bosses in countries including the UK were questioned.

The other countries covered in the survey were Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg and Russia.

EMC said firms needed to put more focus on backup and recovery systems.

Its report found that the most common cause of data loss and downtime was hardware failure, followed by power outage and software malfunction.

Source – BBC News -http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15866885

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Rob Fearnley

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