Backup at Home

 I really like comparing personal backup to enterprise backup. When I first started working in the world of storage my head was swimming with tape drives, storage arrays and the ridiculous number of acronyms our industry loves to use. I didn't even back things up at home. So to dive in to my new job I went out and built a RedHat machine and installed the NetBackup 5.1 beta so I could start protecting my other 2 machines. Probably over kill but it let me play around and learn the product. Eventually I eased up and started using Norton 360 with a portable hard drive. This was way more simple to use and I've actually had it save me a couple of times recently when I was trying out the Windows 7 beta's and deleted the wrong partition (ops, no more 500GB media drive). I slept a little better at night knowing that I had a second copy of my data. And growing up in the digital age, I don't have a single picture, video or music file that is not on a machine.

About 6 months ago I moved out to San Francisco from Minneapolis. As part of the move I was forced to get rid of a lot of stuff. Nothing like paying double the rent for half the space. Having worked at a radio station for several years before coming to Symantec I had amassed an insane amount of music which took up a lot of space. Some of it was demo's and recordings that were one of a kind (still own the first Motion City Soundtrack CD to ever be made!). I kept them in a different location so that if my apartment burned down I wouldn't lose anything, so they acted as a type of recovery in case of a disaster where I lost my first and backup copies. But moving out I was forced to get rid of my tapes...er CD's :) So now I was looking at how I can go digital with my disaster recovery strategy. Luckily Norton 360 has added a remote option so I began to use some online storage space to make 3rd digital copies offsite.

So what does my personal digital pack-rat-ness have to do with enterprise backup? The transition is oddly similar to what a lot of businesses are going through right now. Being forced to get rid of tape for cost or storage reasons (like my CD's), getting serious about a DR strategy that replaces or complements tape shipping with replication (like my newly extended use of Norton 360) and even the integration of backup with replication, HA, and archiving (similar to Norton's integration with security and protection). The real trick for us at Symantec is to put all of this together so that you can have one thing that does it all. That drives a lot of what we think about in our "Information Management" business unit - how can you add features or integrate existing ones to make life in IT easier. Anyone can throw a basket of products at you (or you can go to a bunch of companies and buy everything separate). But we can offer the best products AND have them all work together in one place. It's something we'll never completely solve since there will always be new ways to manage information more efficiently but it's fun to see how confident it makes people when all their digital information can be so relied on.