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  5. You Can Eliminate Backups: Page 2 of 2
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You Can Eliminate Backups: Page 2 of 2

One of the questions in backup circles lately asks if the entire backup process can be eliminated now that most storage systems have some combination of snapshots, deduplication, compression and replication? The idea sounds good. Let primary storage take care of itself and eliminate one of the more troublesome processes in the data center, but there are some holes in the strategy. The question is, can primary storage accomplish everything we expect from a backup target?
George Crump
October 04, 2010

The chances of either of the above scenarios happening is relatively small, but that's why we do backups, to cover the odd event that causes us to lose everything. You could replicate to a second unit locally and then a third in DR, and that is essentially the same thing as doing a backup. We are also assuming that the system failure or corruption would be instantly apparent.

The deduplication or snapshot engine could produce a silent error that does not appear right away. Data is either being written in a corrupted fashion or the deduplication tables are finding false positives, so everything appears to be working correctly and you may not know you have a problem until months later. Suddenly you go to read a file, and it is either missing or corrupted. Most deduplication processes have self-check code to help prevent this sort of thing from occurring, but it is something to be aware of.

Counting on snapshots, deduplication and replication as your primary and even secondary recovery options is perfectly acceptable. The 99.999% of the times it works and provides you with rapid recovery of critical information. Just be aware there are risks involved in not storing your data on a separate platform.

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