Reducing data at the source is the smart way to do backup. That is the conclusion I came to in my last post, If files were bricks, you'd change your backup strategy.  But I also left off by saying that there are different ways to do this.  Let’s take a look at those now.

If somebody asked you to do the exact same work over and over again, would you think that was a smart thing to do? Of course not. But that’s exactly what many of us are doing in our backup environments.

Is flash the answer for the storage needs of the future?

A few months ago the folks at Wikibon published a survey  around a number of different IT topics.  One of the questions centered around the biggest IT challenges that organizations were facing. The top three challenges were data growth, budget constraints and data protection / disaster recovery.

For those readers growing up in the 1970s, you are probably familiar with the commercials for Fram oil filters. For those who don’t know, they featured a grease covered mechanic talking about how changing your oil filter for a few dollars would prevent far more costly car repairs later on.  The tag line was a very convincing: “You can pay me now, or pay me later.”

Last time out I wrote about how snapshots have a visibility problem, meaning it’s difficult if not impossible to tell what’s inside them without having to look into each one.  Yet snapshots are a very effective way of capturing data quickly and often, especially for large data sets, so the use of snapshots continues to expand even while lack of visibility limits their effectiveness.

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.  Nothing is labeled. Insider (registration required)

Our civilization doesn't rest in the hands of hedge fund traders and currency speculators, nor the hands of a Bill Gates or a Steve Jobs or other famous technocrats. Our civilization rests in the hands of the anonymous man wearing awkward rubber gloves who got up in a bucket truck on a cold Sunday night in November to fix the overly fragile wiring system we depend on.

I mentioned last time that I would be talking about snapshots and data protection. And so I shall! But snapshots cover a lot of ground, and I prefer to focus on particular aspects of them, rather than painting a high-level story that many are familiar with.

But let’s at least establish some groundwork. Snapshots are effective for data protection because they are fast and allow you to capture and restore data quickly. They also let you deal with very large amounts of data.  In fact, they may be the only way to do so.

There are so many ways to back up, Cole Porter might say that “anything goes” in data protection.