Readers’ Reactions to Our Opinion: “Backup Is Dead”

We got a lot of reactions to our controversial article published last Friday: "Backup Is Dead. We only need replication." We have selected to publish three emails that we got, two from the member of the same DataSpace Scotland company  who hate our opinion, and another one from Stan Skelton, VP Technology and Business Planning, ESG, LSI, who likes it.

Hi,
 
I’m afraid the editors opinion is a joke, the writer is either a crank or a fool.
 
If any company follows this advice they will be out of business at some point soon. Do us all a favour and retire with your opinions… There are too many flaws in his opinion to educate this fool.
 
The biggest threat companies have right now is disgruntled employees that can delete files and all mirrored/replication services do is copy deleted files… they copy over existing files!
 
Small companied live or die on their data, if the data goes bye bye company.
 
Jim Steel
Managing Director
DataSpace Scotland
 

Dear Monsieur Maleval,

Hard disk drives cannot be moved frequently from one location to another due to their fragility and high likelihood of damage, hence are not good enough for use as a medium for transport to an offsite location.
 
70% of companies have over the last year, been re-introducing tape into their backup systems, because shuffling of data from disk to disk to disk, has been proven not to be good enough protection
 
I absolutely agree that disk replication has a place, for speed and ease of access to data, but not for backup, disaster recovery and archive. The only true backup medium is tape, as it is robust, low cost, can easily be used for incremental/differential backup thus saving multiple versions of the same file over a time period, and can easily be moved offsite to a protective location.
 
The view presented is entirely misinformed, and as a worldwide technology advisor, StorageNewsletter should not be carrying views such as this, which may be implemented by companies who thus put themselves at significant risk of losing data. In addition, there are many companies worldwide who operate in the business of tape backup, and it is factually incorrect to present a view that tape is dead, when in fact it is thriving, and growing as a market. Presenting views such as this puts these companies business into disrepute – it would be better that your magazine sticks to technology facts than personal views which in this case are entirely misinformed !
 
I would like to see StorageNewsletter retract this view with an editor’s letter stating that this was a personal view only, and should not be relied on for technical accuracy !
 
Yours very disappointedly.
 
Jane Steel
Business Development Director
DataSpace Scotland

Jean-Jacques,
 
Nice article today on the demise of backup using replication.
 
I wanted to pass along this blog* posting as it reinforces your premise.
 
Regards
 
Stan Skelton
VP, Technology & Business Planning – ESG
LSI Corporation

*Can you have a backup system based solely on snapshots and replication?
Written by W. Curtis Preston, Executive Editor of Tech Target
This question has come up again. For what it’s worth, I’m still firmly in the camp that says that it is possible to have a complete backup system based solely on snapshots and replications – as long as you can address the criticisms that people have against the idea.