When Is A Backup Not A Backup?

Even though his data was in the cloud and on multiple machines, Matt Honan lost a year’s worth of photos, emails, documents, and who knows what else. The lesson? Back up to disk, tape, or something else and lock it away.

What Does “Data Loss” Mean To You?

Protecting your data against loss means protecting it against a spectrum of risks. If you are worried about corruption or deletion of data, then you should be thinking about replication and backup. If you are worried about your data falling into the wrong hands, then you should be thinking about data encryption solutions along with access controls and separation of duties. Last but not least, if you are worried about regulatory compliance or eDiscovery, then you might also have a requirement to store your data in a provably read-only form.

You Do Take Offsite Backups, Right?

Avsim.com, a popular website for users of flight simulation gear has been felled by hackers who attacked the company’s servers. Unfortunately, data was never stored offsite and offline, so when both servers were attacked, more than a decade of links, software modifications, and exchanges were permanently destroyed.