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Online Backup
For many years there has been a continuing trend that the cost of computer hardware drops.
In relative terms, when you purchase hardware it is more powerful than older equipment,
has more capacity (in terms of both memory and disk storage space), and probably costs
less as well.
But, there is one component which has not kept pace with the improvement in the
cost / performance ratio. That is the backup device.
In the early days of PC servers, some of the first built-in backup systems used
quarter-inch tape cartridges with a modest 40 or 80MB capacity.
As hard disk storage grew, the mag. tape cartridges were superseded by DAT drives
taking the storage capacity up to around 80GB (one thousand times more capacity
than an 80MB DC2000 tape!)
Unfortunately disk storage has been growing at an even faster rate, and even the
trend to use DLT or SDLT backup drives rather than DAT is barely keeping pace with
the growth of hard disk capacity. Disks now have such capacity that the common unit
of description of size will soon, as standard, be the terabyte rather than the gigabyte.
(another 1000 times bigger!).
So, the consequence of this relative cost difference between disk and backup storage
is that the backup system may account for as much as 30% of the total
cost of a new server.
Because of this issue, many people are turning to an alternative.
The now widespread use of high-speed and low-cost broadband Internet connections
means that it is now feasible to back up a network server, via the Internet,
to a service provider who has specialised backup servers which are specifically
intended to provide backup.
These online backup services deal with the cost of internal tape/cartridge backups,
have a high convenience factor (they run automatically on a schedule without any
user intervention).
And they provide a backup which is both offsite and secure (more so than the method
of taking tapes home and leaving them lying around in briefcases).
There’s more information about the online backup service from Mole Systems
here
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