Why Are We Celebrating Backup?

Today is World Backup Day (I suspect Hallmark is behind this), an annual event created to increase awareness around the importance of protecting your data. That last part we agree with completely. But should we really be celebrating backup in the age of cloud? The vast majority of IT professionals we talk to want to get rid of backup and all its associated headaches and hassles. Plus, what would a backup celebration even look like? Since it’s backup we’re talking about, the party would probably start a few hours or days later than planned, and the cake would have a few slices missing!

Nasuni is a cloud file storage platform with automatic file data protection built-in. Many of our customers end up coming to us simply because they’re fed up with their backup and the unglamourous work that is required for it.

• Coffman Engineers swapped their old backup for Nasuni and vastly improved recovery points, recovery times AND lowered costs.
• Global marketing agency Cheil Worldwide exchanged existing backup for Nasuni Continuous File Versioning® and eliminated tapes.
• Technology manufacturer AIXTRON SE was backing up file data to digital disks at its offices in Asia, then pushing them to Germany each weekend, where they were then copied over to tapes. They traded all that in for Nasuni, freeing up IT cycles for more strategic work.

The list goes on, and as Meredith Corporation’s Director of Enterprise Infrastructure Dave Coffman put it simply: “If it’s on Nasuni, I don’t have to back it up.”

To be clear, he’s not disappointed about that.

In fact, I’m not sure any of our clients miss their backup. They don’t pine for the late nights and long weekends they used to spend managing data protection. They’re perfectly fine with letting our platform do all the work automatically, quietly in the background. Even more so, they are happy to accept the credit and thanks when they use Nasuni to restore lost files or folders for end users within minutes.

Traditional backup technology is evolving, but even cloud backup solutions have major flaws. Centralized enterprise backup systems can ingest unstructured data from dozens or hundreds of sites, but they typically utilize central media servers that dedupe and compress the data. With them, when a single site goes down, that backup server can restore the data and access within a business day or so. But if an event impacts multiple locations (dozens or even hundreds of sites), the central backup server can only manage a couple location restores at a time. Time to recover (RTO) can easily increase from a few hours to multiple days, even weeks.

We called for an end to World Backup Day almost ten years ago (why celebrate something you don’t need any more?). Should we celebrate “World Floppy Disk Day” too? The days of traditional file backup are rapidly coming to an end and so should yours!

However, we did decide to have some fun with the “holiday” and are asking folks to share their current backup nightmare. As a thank you, we will send you an Amazon gift card to put towards something that will help you get a good night’s sleep!