Opinion: Are nightly backups irrelevant?
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Many corporations today employ multiple techniques to protect against data loss. Unfortunately, the various approaches are often applied and managed in an uncoordinated manner. Ironically, the nightly backup, for some critical classes of applications, becomes almost irrelevant, representing a tertiary, "last ditch" level of data protection.
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There are multiple known instances of lost or stolen tapes but, to the best of my knowledge, not one reported instance of anyone recovering and maliciously using data stored on missing tapes. It's just too hard for an average thief to retrieve it.
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Battery backups can save your butt during a blackout, but they're usually pretty pricey. Best Buy has one on sale for $29.99.
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Each virtual-machine backup approach has its advantages and disadvantages. Chief among the disadvantages is the effect on network performance and utilization.
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In 1980, I signed a deal with a company to market a product I was developing. The contract required me to turn over the source code, which I did. One day I went to a meeting at the office of the company, and there on the product manager's desk, right next to a door that opened to the outside, was a floppy labeled "Dave Winer's source code" in big letters.  If you own a Mac you may soon find out what that felt like. It's amazing to me that the tech blogosphere doesn't treat Apple's policy re broken hard disks as the huge gaping security hole that it is.  Think about it. We worry about bad people getting their hands on little pieces of data that, when added together, give them the power to be you in banking and credit transactions.  Think about what you would do if your laptop was stolen. Well, if you own a Mac and its hard disk goes bad, and you make the mistake of bringing it to Apple for service, you will turn over all that data to Apple. Not "may" or "might" but "will." What Apple in turn does with that data is none of your affair. They don't sign anything or offer any guarantees that they won't sell the disk to a data miner. Think it can't happen or that it's unlikely? I don't gain much comfort from your feeling of security. I've been writing about this issue since December 22. Usually when I write something critical of Apple, the results are mixed. Some people are supportive, but far more people attack. This time the ratio is very different. Almost everyone who has commented gets that there's a huge problem here. Can we solve this problem? Of course we can.  Some say that other vendors do this too. That gives me less comfort, not more. That means there's no escaping this crazy way of treating user's confidentiality. Ultimately it hurts the vendors because people can't use their computers for things the manufacturers say we can.  Further, it's got to be an issue for the banks, brokerage firms, credit agencies. If you are a newspaper and you employ reporters and they use a computer, how exactly are you guarding the confidentiality of your sources? If you're a confidential source, don't you have an interest when the reporter gives their computer manufacturer all their data to do with as they please? Imagine what you would do if it turned out there was a bug in a Netgear or Linksys router that allowed, under special circumstances, a mailicous person to gain access to the full content of your hard disk at any time. Would you have a problem with that? This is worse than Microsoft's neglect of malware that got me to stop using their computers. In that case it was Microsoft being neglegent. This time Apple itself is the cause of the problem. It's as if they planted a virus in their operating system that entitled them, under special circumstances, completely out of the user's control, to gain access to everything on your disk, with as much time as they want, with no way for you to prevent or even detect the intrusion.  See also: My letter to Steve Jobs.
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(InfoWorld) - Strange but true, some people -- certified techies among them -- prefer to turn it all off when theyâre on holiday. [See also: Great escapes for geeks | Top 10 vacations] Stanton W. Schmidt writes, âI really do want to leave it all behind when I go on vacation. With that in mind I would recommend the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota. There, you cannot get a signal for your cell phone, no matter which provider you have. You don't drive in, you paddle in (no boat motors allowed either). And they don't even allow you to carry in cans or bottles. And no matter where you go, you are likely not to see another human being for most of your trip.â âI purposefully select vacation choices where it's extremely difficult to geek out every day,â replied Ed Kummel. âMy last vacation was in Durango, Colo. Sure, there are coffeehouses in town that have Internet access, but the bike ride down and back up the mountain is not worth it! I learned to make do with my BlackBerry for that week!â For those who would brave the mountain for some quality Internet time, hereâs your real cold turkey, from Gregg Cooke: âThe banks of West Virginia's Greenbrier River, most of which lies inside the National Radio Quiet Zone, so named because it is a 13,000-square-mile âholeâ in the eastern part of the state centered over the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). Even the slightest radio transmissions are hunted down by a team of radio detectives and silenced â¦ they even find malfunctioning microwaves and mistuned automobiles. (Your tax dollars go toward this, you know.) The result is blissful radio silence for the gi-normous radio dishes the NRAO operates to scan the skies and look deep into celestial radio sources. You'll get no cell or wireless signal here, guaranteed!â
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Storage Expo Do you want a SAN or a SANity check?
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Troy Dreier  gives Leopard 4.5 stars (out of five). Praising Time Machine, he predicts that âLeopard will be remembered as the OS that debuted Time Machine, the backup tool that changes everything.â Equally positive about Cover Flow, Quick Look, Spaces, Mail, Boot Camp, and iChat, Dreier concludes that âLeopard is worth the price for Time Machine alone, but the sheer variety of improvements and innovation inside this OS give you much more than your moneyâs worth.â
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(Source: Network Appliance)  Assessing the wide array of D2D options can be daunting. In this paper, we compare disk backup solutions and offer guidance for evaluating the different types of advanced data protection solutions, as well as guidance for identifying the solutions that will meet your needs.
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QUESTION: What is the best approach to protecting me from ID theft and related activities? Will a software package work best, or must I go to a hardware firewall?
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A recent survey of Fortune 1000 companies shows that if you're not using disk-to-disk systems to cut your backup window, you're behind the times. Here's why the technology is so hot.
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It ain't no good if it ain't got good data Call me old-fashioned, but data is still pretty important. In most systems, if you feed bad data in you get bad data out (Garbage In, Garbage Out - GIGO).â¦
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Windows? Linux? Mac OS? One day it won't matter.
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LIVE WEBCAST(Source: Network Appliance) Reduce storage costs with NetApp by deduplicating redundant data transparently to users or applications. Cut disk storage for backup by 95%. Cut archival or file storage 50% or more. Deduplicate data safely with proven technology used for years with NetApp Snapshot and FlexClone features.
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Is it true that hard drives can get tired or aged?
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Paul Reinheimer, one of two behind the funcaday website (providing details on one PHP function each day and special content on the weekends) has posted a supplement to this weekend's posting covering escaping.   The disadvantage with the escape for now, not for later approach is simple. If you save a user's post to the database, then that user's post is displayed 2,000 times there will be some serious differences. [...] You will need to balance your security concerns with performance needs.   The comments on his post back up his suggestions (and include other tips like a recommendation to cache on an even higher level - page blocks).
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Why it ain't going to happen Storage briefing Disk-based backup has become hugely popular in the last couple of years, to the extent that some suppliers have started talking about the "death of tape".â¦