Backup Services

[Cupis]

Hey Guys,

I am busy researching off-site backups and the various different methods of achieving it.

Let me start with Online backups, which offer a great solution for off-site backup since you can just stream it to an off-site location. This method, although wonderful, is not always the answer since certain backups are not suited for incremental backups and a 80gb backup a day obviously is not possible.

This leaves the physical storage such as Portable hard drives and Tape drives which need to be kept off-site to follow company policies. What can we do to achieve this?

A company owned location with a safe: Although this is the common practice I believe, some companies do not have the property to do this and therefore cannot do this.

Hired Bank Vaults: In Durban I am only aware of one of these places, which you can rent a Vault Box and keep whatever you want in it. This seems like the ideal solution, provided that the location is close enough and the price is right. Unfortunately the place I am thinking of is like 40-50k's away and I am not prepared to travel close to a 100k's to swap tapes for the day. Does anyone know if normal banks have such a service or there are a whole network of Vault Banks that I do not know of? (I will call a bank or two to find out, although I doubt it)

Backup Services: I have read of companies which primary solution is to pick-up and deliver tapes and store them in their safes. I think this is a great service to have around, although I am not sure if they are common in South Africa since the quick google search turned up nothing. Is anyone aware of such services that I can look into?

That's all I had in mind, does anyone have any other idea's for off-site backup procedures? Please do not mentioned 'Take tapes home with you', because this is normally an unacceptable procedure for a Corporate and also puts a lot of responsibility on your should something happen to those tapes.

Once again I come to your guys to pick your brains, I would love to see some interesting discussions here.

-Cupis

[doo_much]

Both these have offices in Durban/KZN and offer tape storage services?

http://www.cssi.co.za/contacts.php#

http://www.backupstorage.co.za/product/media-storage/

According to Google...

*edit
/OT

In my previous life, the company I worked for had a huge fixation with 'off-site' storage and refused to even consider utilising a safe on site. We had one that measured ~4*8 meters - a relic of the pre-EFT weekly cash wages days - which we'd gladly have upgraded with watever fire suppression, etc. was required. They refused - best reason I ever got out of them was that it was not 'the industry norm'.

[Cupis]

Nice Find on the BSF, busy browsing around looks like its the perfect fit.

The cssi link I had found but it does not look quite the same. It looks like the are professionals in the field providing the products and services of backup and recovery, but not so much the storage of media. I had seen this in google before, but not quite the same, unless I am missing something.

[Cupis]

Maybe the page that has the product is under construction. Just looked at the one page now.

[Anakha56]

Look up Metrofile, we use them...

[hamin_aus]

+1 Metrofile
Many companies use them to store offsite backups

[doo_much]

Metrofile once lost (track of) a box of my documents for 3 months...

We'd retrieved it once, sent it back and would you believe it - the auditors wanted the same records a few weeks later. Which wasn't available. Suffice to say they weren't happy, impressed or anything like that.

The only time ever I can remember the beancounters supporting a request of mine (which I'd been harping on about for years) for capex. And those rows of filing cabinets didn't come cheap. Although a ~6 year payback period is reasonable?

Conspirace theories abounded when the (now unwanted) box of financially sensitive material finally turned up.

Cue reason I was involved in (not) developing onsite storage for ITs tape backups.