27 août 2008

Of long term backup...

Last week-end I was lucky enough to have a conference from a forest admin here in france and he pointed a curious fact : to manage our forest we have readable and valuable information (on papers, sometime only painted !) around 200 years old... but we are unabled to read data only 15 years old, since computers are used to manage this forest !

We , IT guys, are all aware of the backups necessity. The best practice of keeping backups in safe area, in at least two location and to try full restore from time to time. OK with that ?

Who tried to restore data only 5 years old ? then 15 years old or more ??

Some cloud solutions appearing now (Amazon S3) ; other SAN with fiber chanel ; they are only answering the technological question of today...what about in the future ?


... but in some years , how will we recover data from there ? Once software and systems will be updated... Should we all keep a paper version of every file ?

How do you plan to manage long term backups ?