The title of a talk in an EVault press release last year ("Cost-effective Data Backup and Recovery Does Not Lie in the Spool of the Tape") got me thinking again about data recovery strategies. I take very seriously Intel founder, Andrew Grove's premise, which appeared on the cover of one of his many books that "Only the Paranoid Survive." In that context Grove was writing about business survival, but the concept is transportable to data backup and recovery.

We're now living in an age where a large part of most business activity revolves around the linchpin of corporate data. Without that data, most of us are like those many sad actors you see on talk shows. Without a script, you would not pay to watch them for very long... Our customers would soon think we were less than wonderful, if we forgot to ship their products, or even forgot who they are. The magic of data driven customer service would soon disintegrate into a tragic farce.

One of my customers, from data recovery company ActionFront Data Recovery often comments about the peculiar nature of their business. They promote data recovery, by a variety of methods, but no one considers themselves to be in the market for data recovery until disaster strikes. So much of that advertising goes unnoticed. Now you may say that having a proper backup strategy would avoid many of those problems which require a data recovery company. But that just shows that you're probably not paranoid enough. In a way having a backup strategy is like fire insurance. You know it's a good idea, and you hope that the insurance will pay to rebuild your house if it burns down. But how many of us ask the critical question...

"How long will it take?"

There are problems with every type of backup method, and I'm going to list just a few below which are all based on real life examples.

• The backup tape broke. Then the alternative backup tape broke. Then we found there was a problem with the tape drive and it was chewing up all the tapes.

• The new web backup company went bust.

• Someone broke into the building at the weekend. They stole all the PC's, and servers, and the tape drives.

• We regularly did backups, but only discovered when we tried to restore, that we weren't backing up most of our critical information. Just stuff for applications which are really old and which we no longer use.

• We used a new style of disk to disk backup system. Then a new kind of worm entered our network and trashed our data, and the backup.

• The new business plan was on the marketing VP's notebook, which got stolen.

• There was an electrical fault in our jukebox/tape library which caught fire overnight. Although it self extinguished, many of the optical disks/tape cartridges got somewhat melted.

• We used an internet based data replication scheme. But the electrical storm which knocked out our server, also knocked out the connections to our local ISP. It will be days before we can reload data down the wires.

• Our old server broke, so we got a replacement model. The new version of the server OS doesn't recognise or work with our old backup system.

• The systems administrator who knows all the passwords for restoring everything, is out of communication for two weeks on a walking holiday in the Gobi Desert. He left some notes with someone who got run over by a police car this morning.

• The systems administrator was tired and accidentally overwrote all the new files with old data.

Are you starting to feel paranoid yet?

If so that's a good thing. It's better to start worrying now before you encounter a real problem. All data protection schemes work some of the time, some of them work most of the time, but no single method of data protection works all the time. If your corporate survival depends on the survivability of your data. then start looking at a diversity strategy now. Use more than one method to reduce the rsiks of the most convenient method letting you down. Is that paranoid? Maybe so. But to recap the references I used at the start:- "Cost-effective data backup and recovery does not lie in the spool of the tape" and "Only the paranoid survive."