Even worse than the loss of customer dollars, however, is the potentially disastrous loss of business reputation and customer confidence when an online business goes down. With the increasing number of high-profile outages, this will change. But backup and recovery present special challenges for companies putting their businesses online. If anything, vendors and analysts agree, the more mature commercial companies know more about it because they are coming from an established practice of backing up their mainframes and big data centers. Even that experience has its limits in the new environment.
Data centers go through automated backup procedures at night, which is usually their quieter period.
But with online businesses, the Web site and its applications are supposed to be available 24 hours per day, seven days per week - and there is no overnight backup window, not even a crowded one, he says. These software packages provide automated backup of files and data, usually to a tape library or jukebox that manipulates many units of tape. In addition, recovery from tape is slower than from magnetic disk or hot mirrored sites, where a mirror image of a site's activity is running on separate servers. The backup system can be automatically cut in to take over for the primary system. The two are required to work together.