What will happen if any of the below occur:

• Physical damage to a storage element (such as a disk) that can result in data loss.
• People make mistakes and unhappy employees or external hackers may breach security and maliciously destroy data.
• Software failures can destroy or lose data and viruses can destroy data, impact data integrity, and halt key operations.
• Physical security breaches can destroy equipment that contains data and applications.
• Natural disasters and other events such as earthquakes, lightning strikes, floods, tornados, hurricanes, accidents, chemical spills, and power grid failures can cause not only the loss of data but also the loss of an entire computer facility.

In many ways, backups are the heart of any design of critical systems. Handled properly, they represent the last line of defense against just about any catastrophe. Even if your building or your entire city is wiped out, your business can be restored on other computers from properly generated and protected backup tapes. But there are several “if” conditions that must be satisfied for everything to work out properly and data to be recoverable.

The amount of data that companies are producing is growing exponentially. The sheer quantity of data doesn’t make it any less important to the company. So every bit needs to be backed up in case of an accidental deletion, a hardware failure or, as we have been reminded recently, an actual disaster. Everyone knows the data needs to be preserved, but how does an network administrator go about doing that without devoting all his time to backup management?