Snapshots have a visibility problem

There’s a fantastic bakery in my neighborhood where everything is terrific. Whether you’re getting bread or cakes or cookies, they are the best in town. Unfortunately, there’s one problem.

The problem is that nothing is labeled. When you gaze into the glass cases containing all the goodies you have to guess what you’re looking at. Does that cake have some kind of filling? Is it vanilla frosting or maybe hazelnut instead? What’s under that icing? Chocolate? Carrot cake? You just can’t tell.

So what you have to do is ask and point. “What about that one? No, not that one, the one behind it… yes, that’s it. What does that have in it?”  And so on. It’s maddeningly inefficient. How much simpler it would be if they would just label things so I would know what I was asking for!  What the bakery needs is better visibility.

Which brings us to one of the major drawbacks of using snapshots for data protection: limited visibility.

Peter Eicher is Senior Product Specialist for Data Protection at Syncsort Incorporated. Follow Peter on Twitter @Peter_Eicher.