The Unofficial Backup Admin's Handbook Part 5
Onsite and Offsite Storage Alright, this is the beginning of where Backup and Recovery meets Disaster Recovery. Where is your data stored? Do you keep it in your datacenter? Your Office? Shipped to a Colo or a 3rd party storage? Replicated disk to disk? There are tons of options and they are determined by your company's needs and requirements. Onsite Why would you keep your data onsite? Simplest reason would be speed of recovery. Having the data on location removes the need for shipping medium or transferring over a WAN connection of some sort. This is used when you're less worried about a large scale failure such as a datacenter going dark, but more concerned with data corruption or disk failures. Data can be stored on any medium listed previously. Offsite Distances less than 60 miles are generally not considered valid Disaster Recovery sites, but storage of medium at those locations are still valid for quick recall of medium and still reduces the risk o