Shortcuts to Losing Your Data

Shortcuts to Losing Your Data

In this chapter we’re going to explore the 7 shortcuts to losing your data one-by-one. We’re going to do so by discussing each of these causes of data loss from the perspective of paths. In each section, we’ll first discuss the path associated with the shortcut to losing your data. As illustrated in the picture to the right, this shortcut is designed not only to facilitate your losing your data - but to put you on the fast track for early retirement.

After the shortcut to losing your data is explored, we then describe taking another path - one in which you don’t lose your data and don’t put your job at risk. This path, depicted at the bottom left of this page, is of course the one we recommend.

NUMBER 1: Ignore Hardware Failure

Shortcut to Losing Your Data

Hardware failure is the leading cause of data loss; thus ignoring hardware failure is the most important shortcut you can take in order to lose data. You have several choices with respect to taking this shortcut. The most straightforward technique to lose your data is to imply ignore that hardware failure can occur and simply not backup your systems and data. Of course, that’s a bit crass - there are more subtle ways to ensure data loss.

Another age-old option to help you lose your data is to use tape as your backup medium. With the high failure rates associated with tape, sooner or later you’re assured that you’re going to need to recover your data and not be able to do so.

A creative technique to ensure you will eventually lose your data is to use your SAN or NAS storage device as both the source of the backup and the target of a backup. Note that I’m not referring to snapshots in between physical transfers of data off the SAN or NAS; I’m talking about using your SAN and NAS for primary storage and for backup storage exclusively.

Taking Another Path

To protect yourself from hardware failure, you have to move your data from primary storage to a completely separate secondary storage. That secondary storage can be (and should be) less expensive than your primary storage, but it has to have RAS (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability) characteristics that are as good or better than your primary storage. Those

requirements rule out tape as well as ruling out partitioned primary storage (SAN or NAS) - although SAN and NAS snapshotting may be used between primary backup protection. The best approach is some type of D2D (Disk-to-Disk) backup. The advantage to D2D backup is that you are using secondary media with higher reliability characteristics than tape while still insuring that you have a physically separate secondary storage set so that you can survive hardware and system failure.

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7 Shortcuts to Losing Your Data (and Probably Your Job)

         

7 Shortcuts to Losing Your Data

(and Probably Your Job)

What Are the Consequences of Data Loss?

This tongue in cheek white paper explores data loss from a contrarian point of view - exploring the top 7 shortcuts you can take to ensure that you lose your data. And since a fundamental responsibility of any information technology professional, as well as any C-level executive, is to ensure that the data upon which any company is created is protected - scrupulously following these shortcuts should also ensure that you lose not only your data but your job as well.

93% of companies that lost their data center for 10 days or more due to a disaster, filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster. 50% of businesses that found themselves without data management for this same time period filed for bankruptcy immediately. (National Archives & Records Administration in Washington)

The consequences of data loss are dire; here is a sampling of just a few statistics related to the impact of data loss on business:

7 Shortcuts to Losing Your Data  

1. Ignore Hardware Failure

Hardware failure is the leading cause of data loss; thus ignoring hardware failure is the most important shortcut you can take in order to lose data. You have several choices with respect to taking this shortcut. The most straightforward technique to lose your data is to imply ignore that hardware failure can occur and simply not backup your systems and data. Of course, that’s a bit crass - there are more subtle ways to ensure data loss.

Another age-old option to help you lose your data is to use tape as your backup medium. With the high failure rates associated with tape, sooner or later you’re assured that you’re going to need to recover your data and not be able to do so.

A creative technique to ensure you will eventually lose your data is to use your SAN or NAS storage device as both the source of the backup and the target of a backup. Note that I’m not referring to snapshots in between physical transfers of data off the SAN or NAS; I’m talking about using your SAN and NAS for primary storage and for backup storage exclusively.

In this chapter we’re going to explore the 7 shortcuts to losing your data one-by-one. We’re going to do so by discussing each of these causes of data loss from the perspective of paths. In each section, we’ll first discuss the path associated with the shortcut to losing your data. As illustrated in the picture to the right, this shortcut is designed not only to facilitate your losing your data - but to put you on the fast track for early retirement.

*FACTS*

94% of companies suffering from a catastrophic data loss do not survive - 43% never reopen and 51% close within two years. (University of Texas)

 30% of all businesses that have a major fire go out of business within a year and 70% fail within five years. (Home Office Computing Magazine)

77% of those companies who do test their tape backups found back-up failures. (Boston Computing Network, Data Loss Statistics) 

7 out of 10 small firms that experience a major data loss go out of business within a year. (DTI/Price waterhouse Coopers)

 96% of all business workstations are not being backed up. (Contingency Planning and Strategic Research Corporation)

 50% of all tape backups fail to restore. (Gartner)