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I'm still waiting for the backup vendors to jump into this discussion.
You'll notice that while several vendors sell a backup solution, none sell a
restore solutions ;-). The big boys with terabytes of live data (phone
companies are great examples) frequently have high-end, hot-swappable
mirroring. During the closest they can come to off-peak usage, they "break
the mirror" by removing a drive, and replace it with a fresh drive, which
the RAID "resilvers", an I/O and CPU intensive task under ideal
circumstances. They then can take that drive, insert in another system
dedicated and tuned for backing up the drive, which they do. Should they
take a lightening strike on their power line (if lightening can break the
resistance of a couple miles of air, your UPS ain't gonna stop it, and your
raid will faithfully show corresponding amounts of damage to all mirrors),
it can easily take twelve hours to restore from tape. That's not counting
rebuilding the fried system or switching over to a hot DR site, or
recovering any logged transactions. Restoring a real problem, with no really
good solutions. Thus the joke about no one selling a restore solution.

Now, as for this explosion in drive sizes, which IBM first announced more
than a couple of years ago, I expect that the major vendors have this on
their radar, and are planning to be able to respond. Several people
mentioned ZIP and JAZZ drives, among other options. Guess what? Iomega is,
on their home page, already touting a new product, "Peerless" (get it?),
which takes 10 and 20 GB cartridges, and can support UBS, Firewire, and SCSI
connections. The device lists for $399.99, with one disk (I cannot find
where one can purchase additional disks yet!). If this sounds interesting,
visit http://www.iomega.com and see what they have to say about it. Most of
us (Steve Dirickson excepted) can back up our basic PCs to one such
cartridge, although that won't last long, as drive sizes are already
escalating dramatically.

By 2003, it's hard to say what we will be doing, or how. Home users who are
editing home video may be transferring them to tape, CD, or DVD by this
time, and distributing them to friends and loved ones that way, or have
uploaded them to their vanity page with their ISPs. Speaking for myself, ALL
of my data backs up to about 600MB compressed. For the moment CD-R makes
pretty good sense for my needs, even though that is not what I am using.
Someday DVD-R or RW may be an option, and I do remember reading about a
proposed media of the same form, but which holds 140GB. We'll see! My
primary backup for this is my toy server, which is not entirely different
from having a second drive in the same machine, although I currently use a
removable media. Assuming the worst, I expect to rebuild my current
system(s), not restore them to their current state, and am mostly worried
about "Documents and Settings". I would probably never actually duplicate my
current system(s), because of the 80 / 20 rule. I will recreate the
important stuff first, and probably never get around to some of the minutia.
That's a risk I am willing to take, for what I am currently doing at home.

Business users will have very different concerns. Like the auditors some
mentioned. There are legal and contractual obligations; I know that we
discuss those from time to time here. And on some occasions, there's even
common sense. Whenever anyone complains about this ongoing concern in the
face of budgetary pressures, I joke "You should only back up what you are
going to need to restore". This is usually good for a laugh, when someone
bean counter's common sense has failed. I guess I can say that on at least
one mainframe system, we have a "virtual tape library". That a bunch of
disks, probably mirrored somehow, and a tape library, with some lucky folks
worrying about what gets backed up to "virtual tape" (a disk file with the
same characteristics as the tape). That may or may not then get written to
real tape, either immediately or after some period of disuse.

And that's just one solution, for the moment. It will be interesting to see
how things progress! I remember years ago seeing a nine-track tape drive
die; when we reevaluated what we were doing and what our choices where, we
discovered that our fiche vendor now accepted 3 1/2 inch diskettes, which
were more than adequate to hold the same data. I am surprise that no one
mentioned the phenomenon of "memory sticks" and other devices that store
fairly sizable amounts of data in non-volatile RAM. How we store data, and
how much, seems to keep lurching forward, compelling us to revisit old
verities.

Greg Stigers
http://www.cgiusa.com

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