Comment Re:Too Risky (Score 1) 780
I agree with most everything you say but there are a few factors that you are not addressing, most of them centering around cost and benefit analysis.
1) How much data is there?
2) How critical is it (e.g. what are the costs of replacing the data or in-operation due to lack of data)?
3) Recovery costs - Do offsite backups actually fit into a disaster recovery plan that works for your company? Can you replace your production network and hardware quickly?
The thing I was reacting to are statements like 'a backup is only a good backup if it is on tape' and shipping tapes to an offset is easy and cost effective backup solution.
These are not feasible statements to make if you are responsible for backing up databases that are anything over a few hundred GBs. I don't even know if there are tapes fast enough to backup that up in a single hour.
A good backup solution is tailored to meet the needs of the environment. There are indeed very general guidelines and best practices to follow but you can't treat everything like it is mission-critical finance data for a global bank.