There has been a huge evolution in backup technology in recent years. In the traditional backups that were mainly to tape we simply backed up files and folders which could be restored. Sound great? No. For us IT admins it was a nightmare if a system completely failed and needed to be restored from the ground up. In short, it would involve us spending hours if not days reinstalling the operating system and carrying out a disaster recovery of applications one by one, many times the text book procedure would fail and we would have to start the entire process all over again. With the introduction of virtualisation this improved somewhat as we could snapshot the machine before moving onto the next stage, giving us the chance to go back to that point if required. Still far from ideal when you’re up against the clock OR having to provide disaster recovery planning, testing and documentation.
