In this article, we'll be discussing the history and importance of backup and disaster recovery solutions, or BDR solutions. These technologies have progressed quite significantly over time, and monitoring the past of these solutions can give you a better idea of where we are now and where we can go in the future. The importance of proper data security is fairly difficult to understate, and the best way to help employees and business owners understand that is by exploring their history.
Additionally, we'll be talking about a concept that goes a little bit beyond backups: business continuity. This is the concept that a business should have as little downtime as possible, which means business owners should be using different metrics to choose their backup solutions.
The Old Ways [Physical Media]
Since the 60s, businesses have started backing up their data with formats a little bit more advanced than punch cards. The format that changed things was tape -- yes, tape -- that could be used to safely store data en masse for long periods of time, well before hard drives took over the scene in storage. The primary issue with tape was that accessing that data took ages, since it needed to be stored sequentially and be rewound/fast-forwarded. (The restrictions of your VCR are the same ones that restricted tape as a backup solution.)
Magnetic tape is still used in some implementations today, and it significantly outlasted its first real competitor, the floppy disk. Floppy disks were quickly made irrelevant by CDs and DVDs, thanks to their massively increased storage space versus the old floppy. Even those formats would later be overtaken by the more recent advancements in local storage technology, such as Blu-Ray disks and large-capacity hard drives.
Starting in the eighties, however, a new form of storage popped up alongside the LAN, or Local Area Network. As networking technology advanced, Network-Attached Storage (NAS) became possible, and eventually wholly-online backup solutions entered the fray, too. These remote backup solutions found their way to businesses small and large, and set the path for the next point in history we're about to discuss.
Prevention and Recovery
While having backup solutions was a great step forward, it failed to address the core problem: that data could still be lost. Tape archives and other solutions made it possible to archive data and create backups that could restore a system in case of data loss, but a system in place to actually prevent that data loss didn't exist for quite some time. With the creation of stronger networking infrastructure and on-site servers, businesses found it was possible to protect integrated systems while keeping them on physically separate servers managed by different employees.
