Disasters will happen. They can range from a file being lost, to a data center being flooded, to an entire building being destroyed. Some of these incidents are common ones, such as file loss or data corruption, systems and infrastructure going down and becoming unavailable, disk drives failing, and users err (remember, humans invented human error). Then there are the somewhat common incidents, including facility disasters involving flooding or fire. Even though the odds are less likely, there may be major natural disasters to contend with including earthquakes, tornadoes, and hurricanes. And there have been a few recent incidents of large geographic blackouts that take hours or even days to correct.

The fact that most companies and organizations still use tape as their primary defense against these events is troubling. Once, there was an economic rationalization to use it, but data de-duplication-enabled solutions invalidate this. There are end-users that are mandated to use tape for governance and regulatory reasons, but they can use data de-duplication-enabled solutions to augment their environments. For those companies not so encumbered, they should certainly consider data de-duplication to complement and even replace their tape systems.