June 8th, 2007
Practical strategies for protecting your data
In my series on RAID technology and why it makes sense for home users, fellow blogger Robin Harris took me to task saying that RAID won’t ever fly in the home. Robin’s main gripe with RAID is that it doesn’t address the backup along with other complaints such as the cost, reliability, and complexity of RAID technology. Robin further argues that RAID gives people the false impression that they don’t need to backup. I have to admit that when I first read Robin’s counter arguments, I was a bit upset with him but I’ve since given it some thought. While I still think he got many things wrong, Robin does bring up a lot good points that need to be debated so I’m going to address his arguments point by point.
What is a backup? If we go with the classic dictionary definition of backup, RAID redundancy is a form of backup because it provides insurance against a physical disk failure. From an IT (Information Technology) department’s standpoint, RAID redundancy doesn’t meet the criteria for “backup” because it isn’t off-line which means it’s easier to get accidentally deleted or corrupted and it lacks geographic diversity because it’s in the same physical building. For this reason, RAID redundancy is called “availability” so that a failure of a drive doesn’t force you to go down for hours while you recover your data. Only a copy of the data that is physically moved off-site by someone picking up the tape or portable hard drive or replicated to a remote site can be considered a true backup. The problem is that consumers won’t ever go to this expense or trouble to backup their data and they’re at the mercy of a:
- Data corruption or deletion
- Disk failure
- Physical disaster like flood or fire.
The first two issues are probably going to be the most common reasons people lose data. Most of the time, users will lose data to a disk failure or data corruption or deletion due to accidental or malicious Malware threats. Almost every survey that has ever been taken shows that the vast majority of consumers don’t backup their data and the few who do backup don’t do it regularly. If I had to make an educated guess, I would say more than 90% of consumers don’t backup regularly and nothing that I say or anyone else can say is going to change that. Out of the remaining few that do backup their data, most of them probably aren’t doing off-site backup. The question becomes what do we do about this?
Robin Harris thinks that people should just forget about RAID redundancy and just backup their data and keep it off-site. I can’t argue with Robin that off-site backup is the IDEAL solution; the problem is that I don’t think it’s a realistic option for most people, at least not for all of your data. It isn’t just the cost issue associated with backups, it’s the fact that it requires action and most people are naturally lazy. If it isn’t seamless, cheap, and easy for them, they simply won’t do it. What’s needed is a hybrid approach that’s tailored to people’s needs and I’m going to explain how to determine the best approach to protecting one’s data.
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George Ou is Technical Director of ZDNet. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
