How environmentally friendly is your current data backup process?

I suspect that you currently have a tape drive or CD/DVD rom installed in your system that you regularly save data too. If you consider your scenario and multiply this by thousands, that is the extent of companies running an in house backup procedure. Think of the potential landfill for old tapes and drives!!

How is on line backup better for the environment?

Our servers have the capacity to replace many thousands of tape drives. For example, if you had 50 customers with 10gb of data to backup each would need a tape drive (50x drives in total) and sufficient media to enable them to rotate on a 7 day cycle (350 tapes).

We would need one hard disk

Compare the scale when disposing of 1x hard disk at end of life to 50x tape drives and 350 media. This also results in an indirect saving on natural resources and greenhouse gas emissions that would be otherwise used and produced by factories in the manufacture of tape backup units and relevant media.

Save on Landfill

When a new server is installed in many cases the “old” tape drive is replaced. This leaves the customer/supplier with a tape drive and old magnetic media to dispose of. Invariably it will be “binned” and ultimately be taken to a landfill site somewhere in the world. In addition the old unit is replaced by a new unit and tapes and the entire cycle starts again. I suspect if you had a look in drawers near to your server you will find old CD’s, tapes etc that will never be used again and will eventually be disposed of. You only have to multiply this by a number offices to estimate how many of these there are in the UK alone just waiting to be buried in Landfill sites as they are of no further use. It is a continuous cycle.

Natural resources and Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Due to advances in technology, the power consumption of our servers is far more efficient than the collective power needed to run the many backup drives they replace. This saves on electricity and therefore another area that helps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Existing Off Site Tape Storage

If you already use a manual form of off site data storage and have your tapes collected and stored in a secure location you will need to have them collected by a ‘man in a van’. You will also need them delivered back if you are operating a tape rotational procedure and also if you need to restore. Vans/cars use fossil fuels in most cases and also cause road congestion and yet more greenhouse gas emissions. Our system is Internet only and therefore does not use vehicles. This ultimately helps to reduce the number of vehicles on the road easing traffic congestion and reducing fossil fuel consumption.