Modern Data Protection

Chapter 6. Traditional Data Sources

Understanding where all of an organization’s data lies is a lot more complicated than it was when I started my backup and recovery career. If someone asked me back then where all my company’s data was, all I had to do was walk them down the hall and point. “There. There’s all my data,” I would say, as I pointed at the datacenter. All servers were physical, laptops were rare, and even desktops were not that common. As hard as it is for a modern IT person to grasp, we used what we called dumb terminals to connect to the servers that were in the datacenter. (Lotus 1-2-3 ran on AT&T 3B2s, and a curses version of WordPerfect ran on DEC Ultrix servers.) All data was in the datacenter; that’s why it was called the datacenter.

Compare this with the infrastructure of a typical organization today. Servers are rarely physical, and they are often not even located within the confines of the buildings where the organization lives. Laptops are ubiquitous and even mobile phones and tablets are used to create and store the organization’s data. Data is often created and stored on servers and services that no one in the organization will ever physically see. In short—the datacenter is no longer the center of data.

That’s why this chapter (and the next two chapters) exists. Although some of these data sources will be obvious, others are not. Even some of the obvious ones might come with a few surprises.

This chapter will be dedicated to what I now think of as traditional ...