Welcome to the Storage magazine eNewsletter for May. The 31st of March saw World Backup Day - a date when the industry tries to remind the wider world of the importance of a properly defined and tested backup strategy. It has to be said though that for many, those words fall on deaf ears.

A couple of weeks ago though, I had reason to be personally very grateful that we at Storage magazine do - to some extent at least - practice what we preach when it comes to backup. Having worked almost entirely from home for many years now, I have had processes in place for some time to ensure 'just in case' continuity of data between my workstation here in rural Wales and the Kent office of our publishers.

When I started my PC to find that my work inbox had mysteriously emptied itself of emails overnight, I didn't panic. A quick check with the office showed that if necessary they could access and share cloud backups of everything I'd sent and received from that address in the last month. First though I wanted to check my local backups - a daily copy to external HDD that ran at 11pm. To my delight I was able to restore everything within 30 minutes or so of finding the problem - but it was reassuring to know that if my local backup had let me down, I had an extra level of offsite copies to save my bacon. I thanked the gods of backup that day for encouraging good practices!

STOP PRESS: I'm delighted to announce that nominations have literally just opened for this year's 'back-with-a-vengeance' Storage Awards - head to www.storage-awards.com right now to make your voice heard!

David Tyler, Editor
Storage magazine

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