If you’ve never had a system failure, count yourself lucky. Most business people have some tale of a colleague or co-worker who had their computer crash, only to realize too late that the last backup was done during the Bill Clinton administration.

And if you’re reviewing your own company’s backup strategy, then you’re probably encountering a litany of different types of information on ways to back up your data. Let’s look at the most common ones shall we? Because it’s almost guaranteed that a backup will save your bacon one day.

For years, the most common form of backup was tape. However in the last few years other options have arisen that make backup planning much more complicated. Depending on the amount of data you have, your requirement for system uptime, or other performance considerations, the options to retain your data are many and numerous.

Tape is still around, and is a great option for those companies with significant amounts of data who wish to store data off-site. The cost per Megabyte (MB) has fallen so drastically in the past few years that brand new devices and tapes can be had for surprisingly low prices.

Disk based backups are also fairly popular lately. With the declining cost of hard drives, and their expanding capacities it’s no wonder that disk-based backup solutions are gaining momentum. After all, you can buy a 1-Terabyte hard drive for well under $500, so why buy tape, right? These are sometimes referred to as Disk-To-Disk, or D2D backups. There are actually valid reasons tape is better, but that’s a subject for another time.

There’s also an option called D2D2T or Disk-To-Disk-To Tape which is used on large data volumes. With this option, a disk-based backup is taken first, since it’s often faster to write to a second disk than it is to write tape. Once the copy of the data is taken, then the copy is written to tape. The advantage here is that the live data is available for the greatest period of time, and then you have a full day to write the tape – no more worries about how long the backup takes.

There are other options as well, believe it or not (I’m sure you can see how this subject can quickly become confusing). Microsoft has a technology called Volume Shadow Copy Service (or VSS), which takes snapshots of a hard drive, and stores them locally. This is a good idea ONLY if you have a second backup strategy in place, since VSS doesn’t protect you if your hard drive fails. There’s also more elaborate equivalents of VSS, sometimes referred to as ‘filers’. They’re designed for one thing: holding lots of files. And they often have technology similar to VSS, and usually a bit more robust.

Backup really can be a bit of a maze if you’re less than perfectly sure of your long term requirements. As always, be sure to consult your technical support provider for guidance, and make sure you have your technology, and your data, in check.