Where backup gets confusing
There is one thing that always comes up in my backup conversations with our customers is I think what people call backup generically can mean different things for different people. I usually put it into one of three buckets.
- Disaster Recovery
- Data Protection
- Up-time Protection
Disaster Recovery
Just like the Allstate commercials, mayhem is always lurking. Your video team is one spilled cup of coffee, power surge or natural disaster away from losing all of your data. As a means of ensuring that data isn't lost forever, backing your files up off-site is a great way of setting up disaster recovery.
Data Protection
When we talk about data protection we are mostly talking about strategies for protecting local files from being deleted or a RAID controller failing. A local data protection strategy is completely different than what you would use for a disaster recovery. Either strategy will help protect you from a variety of different things.
Up-time Protection
Last but not least which is often actually what people are talking about is is up-time protection. So how you protect yourself from, or how you guarantee up-time versus how you backup data. There's like, a Venn diagram where some of the things cross over.
A lot of times people say they want backup. But what they really want to do is make sure that no matter what happens, they can keep working on projects which can include backup but that's not always the best answer necessarily. I think it's really really important to kind of start with that foundation of like which of these are you really trying to to accomplish before you dive into how to do it.
Conclusion
Making sure your data is protected for any scenario is critical. However, you need to plan ahead and know exactly what your video team can tolerate in terms of down time. If it is a few days you may need to focus more on data protection or disaster recovery. If downtime is out of the question then your strategy should focus on maintaining up-time.
Need help figuring out what your team needs to protect your data? Get in touch here or feel free to reach out to us at 800-944-6629 to get your backup plan squared away.
