Thoughts on backup, recovery and copies of data.

Looking back as to how I ended up at StorageCraft a number of years ago, it all came down to what I was actually trying to accomplish in other roles and companies for well over 2 decades.

Recovery.

Fast recovery. 

Fast & easy recovery that's agnostic to hardware, hypervisor and storage.

It's all about the RECOVERY. StorageCraft partners and customers get that ... that's for certain. StorageCraft is simply the most robust backup and recovery solution for Windows & Linux systems, virtual or physical, on the market today. 

Yeah ... It just works. 

That ain't some silly marketing slogan. Heck! I'm not even in Marketing! With StorageCraft, it just works. 

Any recovery point you have, you just boot it up ... Voila! There it is! No pre-staging a VM, disk, or virtual disk ... just boot it, any recovery point ... leverage VirtualBox, 2012R2 Hyper-V, or our newest, coolest, slickest, VMworld 2016 award winning VirtualBoot technology:

VirtualBoot for VMware vSphere

Now, what about the number of copies of your data? 

Well ... Count 'em ... please! It's important. 

Now remember, you can't count the running server as a copy since it is constantly changing. Once you observe it by taking a snapshot at a certain point time ...

Wait.

I'm chuckling here 'cause this is reminding me of Erwin Schr?dinger's thought experiment!

Buy yeah, kinda the same idea as with Schr?dinger. The key takeaway for us here is that you cannot count the running server as a copy. You have to make a copy. Essentially, that copy is a historical record/copy for that specific point in time. That is what we refer to as your backup.

With backups, this counting-of-copies-of-data exercise has always been a core part of any Disaster Recovery solution architecture.

In the old days with ancient backup technology, we'd have 1 copy of our data. That copy was typically written to tape. Then, we would put those tapes somewhere ... either onsite or offsite ... BUT, it was still your only copy of that data. If the media failed when trying to do a restore, that copy was gone forever. 

Terrible. 

Today, some vendor's have recreated ... for whatever crazy reason ... that out-dated obsolete architecture using the internet instead of ... well, having some guys show up in a van to pick up your tapes. 

Yep, here in 2016, you can backup directly to the Cloud. No local copy. The only copy of your data sits on some storage somewhere. Recovery? You know the answer ... "Just download it!". Hmmm, just download it? What if there's 1.5TB of data that needs to be downloaded? Well, that could easily fail an RTO requirement.

Asinine.

Now, I will state that for individual files, as with say a mobile workstation/laptop, this could be a viable solution ... one where you "backup directly to the 'Cloud'" and download individual file(s) when necessary. However, if we're talking DR for servers, critical business systems, etc.; it is highly probable this type of a solution is not appropriate. 

There a better way ... a much better way. 

StorageCraft.

With StorageCraft, you will have a local copy of your data where you can do a quick & easy file/folder recovery from backups taken down to every 15 minutes, if required. If you need to bring the system up, you just boot the server on-demand from any recovery point/backup. 

That's it. Just boot it. 

With our Cloud Services, you can have Copy #2 and as with our Cloud Services offering in the USA, you can have a Copy #3 as well!

StorageCraft Cloud Services recovery? It's all done through a self-service web portal where you can mount any recovery point in seconds for a quick & easy file/folder recovery. You can also ... just boot any server's recovery point on-demand or boot up a site on-demand with one button!

For test or real production failover. Your choice.

That's it. 

It's that freakin' easy. 

Seriously, why would you not use StorageCraft?