I spent the week working with a consultant to install a brand-spankin' new backup system in my data center. The single tape-drive system I'd been using for the last few years is finally no longer large enough to backup all of the data from my users. This new system should give me the capacity for many years to come.
It's really a very cool system.... it's a tape auto-loading system. That means that there are 10 tapes loaded in the machine and it automatically switches them in and out of the tape drive. That gives me 10x the capacity of a single tape automatically. The new drive takes tapes that can hold 4x the amount of my previous system. That means that the new backup drive can support FORTY TIMES the amount of data as I was previously able to store. What makes this exciting is that I'm no longer limited to keeping a backup history of a single week. Now I can store several weeks of data history... so if a customer messes up their site but doesn't figure it out for a week or two, I can still recover the lost files.
Of course, this new system will still work in conjunction with my remote backup system (which I offer at no extra cost to dedicated server customers). So dedicated customers have their data backed up twice, once to tape locally, and once remotely to a data center in San Antonio.
This is just one more step in the long history of continuous equipment upgrades to my data center. These investments ensure that we maintain 100% uptime, high level data security, and reduced risk in disaster recovery. Imagine, all that and stellar customer service, too!