How do I protect business critical data against fire?

Solution 1:

Well, first of all, you should always have an off-site copy of your data. Not just because there might be a fire, but what would you do in the event of a natural disaster, or similar event making your building inaccessible? Without a copy of your data off site, you're just hosed.

So, that said, there are two ways to have an off site copy of your data.

1. Offsite Backups.

   • Typically you contract with a company like Cintas (the big name in that area I'm familiar with) to take your backup tapes to one of their facilities, but even something like having an employee take the daily backups home with him at the end of the day is better than nothing.
     
     

2. A co-location facility of some sort.

   • Somewhere else that you have a server or servers to house your data, either a physical site, like a data center or a cloud service.

The advantage of #2 is that you can use it for #1 as well, in addition to the ability to have a business continuity plan in the case of a disaster. You can put in a backup system (hopefully in addition to the one you have at your main site), so you have off site backups, and if your main site goes down, you can run your services from the co-location site (often in a somewhat decreased capacity, if cost-savings are an issue).

Neither is particularly cheap, and may well exceed the price of a fireproof safe, but the advantages are that they provide something you can't get from a fireproof safe, which is protection against all types of data loss, whereas a fireproof safe only protects against fire.

The business case/cot justification for this is basically asking the question "what happens if we lose our data?" The answer is almost always that you go out of business, which makes it fairly easy to convince the people in charge of the need for a proper backup scheme and/or co-location facility. (And most places I've worked have had both, even if only because the techs pushed for them until they happened.)

Solution 2:

Back them up on Amazon glacier. Cheap storage for things that you don't need to access often. It will cost you 1cent per GB per month. As a downside, it might be pricey to fetch your data back in case of failure.

Solution 3:

If the data's critical, you should be backing it up. Your backup scheme should include backups to tape and offsite storage of some sets of tapes.

Beyond that, it's all details... how much data? how often does it change? what sort of recovery time do you need?

If "webcast inventory" means large files that don't change frequently, then a periodic backup to tape seems pretty straightforward.

Solution 4:

You don't really mention the SIZE of the 72 drives, but if it's really critical then you should at least have a backup at a remote location. Media rated firesafes are great for protecting the data on-site, but what if your building is a total loss. As in, everything is gone, including the safe. If you do start utilizing off-site or online backups, make sure that their building/ data center isn't close enough to yours, that they could both be destroyed at once.