Importance of Back-up & storage

We seem to be obsessed with taking multiple copies of data these days. For our personal data we take a copy on CD drive,USB jump drive, and an external HD drive and of course we have multiple copies on our computer as well. But when it comes to storing our business data, we are even more cautious and plenty of SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) /RAID (Redundant Array of Independent or Inexpensive Disks), disk drives and storage array across the network come handy. So we take backups everywhere. We make sure to leave a copy of our work on every folder and server. I have a gut feeling that every piece of data exists on at least twenty places on the network.


I do not want to undermine the need to have backups and disaster recovery for a large organization but I think we are doing too much on this. Of course storage has become very cheap but filling up racks with these drives in our data centers is unnecessary. There are already some storage optimization software in market to remove redundant data on the network and free millions of gigabytes. On such company, I came across during my visit to IECT last month is njini----isn't that unique name. They have a product called IAM Suite (Information Asset Management suite) which I am told has all capabilities to do this job. Let us get over with habit of having multiple copies. I know storage device are cheap but it is still a wastage.