Do you outsource data backup
 

Do you outsource data backup services and other services to help restore files if there is a crisis? Or is this something that you do in house.

i prefer to have things handled by my own staff. It provides for a higher level of control if a problem occurs. Some companies do not have the staffing they need and would need to outsource.

This is very true. You need to make sure you have the staff that is knowledgeable and skilled enough to handle backup solutions. if you do, it should help to cut down on costs since you will not need to pay another company to provide these services.

Hi,

If you dont believe with any admins.

You can go for the R1 soft backup as it doesnt need so much of technical skills.

One thing to also consider if whether or not you have offsite requirements for tape rotations. If you do, you will be doing the back-ups on-site and having to use a company like Iron Mountain to do off-site archiving. One thing we did, at an old company I worked for, was fedex a locked box to a different office for a week and that office would send us their tapes. We would take their box and hold it for a week and fedex it back. That made it so that we could restore from systems that were on our network from a different location. Both of these have costs from them.

I am neutral on the outsourced vs. in-house. The outsourced makes sense to me since you can restore from anywhere; regardless where you have to restore. If your building burns to the ground, it makes sense to have storage on standby to restore at a different location.

For tapes I would recommend an off-site tape library located in a proffesional datacenter. The library automaticaly takes care of tape rewinding, moves data to a new tape once tape quality starts to decrease etc. All the big brands offer this solutions at various sizes ... from 4 tapes automated libraries up to almost unlimited tapes for enterprise solutions.

It is always best to create and manage the back-up in-house. It is the most flexible solution available and other outsourced firms may not have the same level of technical understanding of the back-up and there can be considerable delays when another firm is asked to take care of the back up

Companies sometimes use outsource data centers if their services are excellent.

We control all of our own backups, but once a week we do an external backup to an off site location which we also control. This way, we never rely on another company, but we also have two locations with full control over both locations. If one goes down, we can be up and running within 10 minutes with one phone call. Never a problem.

I'd rather have my own staff to handle problems, I don't trust anyone, especially not someone in another state or even another country to be there when I need them. If one of my guys doesn't answer the phone, he expects consequences. Some other company will just tell you there were technical difficulties, no direct consequences.