Time to fire the man in the van

The man in the van can lose your tapes.  Any questions?

It’s the man, not the mountain

Yes, Iron Mountain has had many very public incidents of losing tapes. You can do a google search for Iron Mountain Loses Tapes to see what I’m talking about.  When all these stories started hitting the news back in 2005 (thanks to California’s new law requiring you to report such things), Iron Mountain’s official response was, “Iron Mountain performs upwards of five million pickups and deliveries of backup tapes each year, with greater than 99.999% reliability. Nevertheless, since the beginning of the year, four events of human error at Iron Mountain resulted in the loss of a customer’s computer backup tapes. While four losses is not a large number in comparison to an annual rate of five million transportation events, any loss is important to customers and to Iron Mountain … Iron Mountain is advising its customers that current, commonly used disaster recovery processes do not address increased requirements for protecting personal information from inadvertent disclosure.”

The tape vaulting company I used to use back in the day lost one or two of our tapes a year.  We gave them about 50 tapes a day, and retrieved 50 more back.  We tracked each individual tape, and were linked into their system to show when the tapes made it into the vault.  Every once in a while, there would be a discrepancy where one of the tapes would not show up in the vault.  This resulted in a search, and inevitably the tape would be found somewhere along the way.  Good times.

I remember one vaulting customer that received a box of tapes that weren’t theres.  When they called their rep, they had him read the bar codes off the tapes.  They couldn’t figure out whose they were, so the vaulting company said they should keep the tapes!

As long as media vaulting companies employ humans to be the “man” in the van, this problem will continue.  Humans do dumb things.  Humans make mistakes. So until these companies start hiring robots to pick up and deliver tapes, we will continue to see these problems.  However, I think much of the world will have moved to electronic vaulting by then.

I’ve always liked electronic vaulting

If you’re not going to use tapes to get your data offsite, you can use electronic vaulting.  This can be accomplished via a few different methods.

Onsite & Offsite Target Dedupe Appliance

There are a number of vendors that will be happy to sell you an appliance that will dedupe any backups you send to it. Those deduped backups are then replicated to another dedupe appliance offsite. This has been the primary model for the last 15 years or so to accomplish electronic vaulting. The problem is that these appliances are very expensive, and you have to buy two of them – as well as power, cool, and maintain them. It’s the most expensive of the three options mentioned here.

Source dedupe to offsite appliance

It makes more sense to buy backup software that will dedupe the data before it’s sent to an appliance. This appliance can be offsite, so that data is immediately sent offsite.  It can even be a virtual appliance running as a VM in the cloud.  Most people exploring this option opt for an onsite copy that replicates to the offsite appliance or VM.  Most vendors selling this type of solution tend to want to charge you for both copies.

Source dedupe to a cloud service

If you are backing up to a true cloud service (not just backup software running in some VMs in the cloud), and you are deduping data before it is sent to the cloud. Vendors that use this model tend to only charge you for the cloud copy. If they support a local appliance for quick recoveries, they tend not to charge for that copy. That makes this option the least expensive of the three

Fire the man, get a plan

Wow, I like that!  There are a number of ways you can now have onsite and offsite backups without ever touching a tape or talking to a man in the van down by the river.  Look into them and join the new millennium.

Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston), four-time O'Reilly author, and host of The Backup Wrap-up podcast. I am now the Technology Evangelist at Sullivan Strickler, which helps companies manage their legacy data