Syncsort kicked off our celebration of World Backup Day yesterday by hosting a Tweetchat with Enterprise Strategy Group Senior Analyst Jason Buffington. If you missed it, you can easily go back and check out the conversation by searching #backupjam.
One of the main participants that joined in was industry watcher and self-described “vendor watchdog” Jon Toigo. Jonmade a number of interesting points during the discussion, and I want to touch on some of them. I’ll pick a few at a time over the next week or so and share some additional thoughts.
Jon’s opening remark was almost philosophical:
Backup defined: A humble acknowledgement of the fallibility of all technology, and of our increasing dependency upon it
That is certainly an interesting way to define “backup,” and there is nothing there I would argue with. If you live and breathe in the backup space like I do, sometimes it all starts to seem very normal. But think about it: literally billions of dollars are spent every year to protect information, to protect intangible, digital assets that exist ultimately as zeros and ones. And why do we spend that money? We do it because every digital tool fails eventually. Every single one!
Whether it’s your iPhone, a laptop or a multi-billion dollar data center project like the one Jon referenced during the Tweetchat, sooner or later something goes wrong. The result is that something very valuable to somebody vanishes, whether that’s your only copy of beloved vacation photos, your collection of five thousand songs, or a customer database that a business cannot function without. And if you’ve ever suffered through this – and who hasn’t at least once? – you know the panic it causes, the desperate too-late feeling of “I knew I should have backed that up.”
If you lose data and do have a backup of it, the sense of relief when those files start coming back is incredible. If you’re an IT person responsible for backup, it’s more than relief. It is not an exaggeration to say it can mean saving your job, or even saving your company and the jobs of many other people. It’s that important.
That’s why World Backup Day was started, so that we can all think about what we’d be losing if the inevitable decided to pick us as its next victim. And that’s the thing about something that happens to everyone: it happens to you, too.
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