{"id":1869,"date":"2010-02-11T20:20:46","date_gmt":"2010-02-11T10:20:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/?p=1869"},"modified":"2018-12-11T19:01:08","modified_gmt":"2018-12-11T09:01:08","slug":"backup-is-insurance-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/2010\/02\/11\/backup-is-insurance-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Backup is Insurance"},"content":{"rendered":"

As evidenced by the title of my book (Enterprise Systems Backup and Recovery: A corporate insurance policy<\/strong><\/a>), I’m a firm believer that the only way to conceptualise the purpose of backup is to describe it as insurance<\/em>. The way I describe this is to compare the way in which we take out insurance, but hope not to use it, and to make backups, and similarly hope not to use them. This can be easiest described through a couple of Venn diagrams.<\/p>\n

First, let’s look at insurance:<\/p>\n

\"Backup<\/a>No-one wants to claim on their insurance. We take it out on a yearly basis, and any year that we don’t have to use it is good. (Particularly in countries where insurance companies run rough-shod over morality, decency and legal restraint.) I personally have home insurance, contents insurance, car insurance, travel insurance (whenever I travel) and health insurance. Any time I don’t<\/em> have to make a claim on any of these types of insurance is good \u2013 because in order to make a claim, something bad needs to have happened. So I’m much happier paying the fees each year and hoping that I don’t have any more involvement than that with my insurance agencies. Do I resent paying these fees? Hell no \u2013 because I’m well aware that if I don’t<\/em>, and something bad happens, I’ll be up the creek without a paddle. (Or to use the Australian vernacular, I’d be up s\u2013\u2013t creek.)<\/p>\n

So let’s see the Venn diagram for backup:<\/p>\n

\"Venn<\/a>As you can see, it’s spookily similar to the diagram for insurance. Now, one of the first things that I tend to hear when I roll out my “backup = insurance” argument is that occasionally, people will<\/em> want to recover from backups \u2013 e.g., to migrate between systems, refresh Q\/A systems from production, etc. Well, this isn’t really using backup for the primary purpose \u2013 recovery, but instead using it as a data migration\/retrieval system. It’s a fine distinction, but it’s an important distinction. The primary reason backup systems are deployed is to recover data when there’s been a failure \u2013 any secondary benefit from a backup and recovery system is just that \u2013 a secondary benefit.<\/p>\n

Your next question may be \u2013 so what point is there in classifying backup as a type of insurance?<\/p>\n

This is the absolute core of why companies need to think of backup as being a type of insurance \u2013 it’s all about the budget.<\/p>\n

Look at an example company. Let’s say there’s 5 departments:<\/p>\n