Khaled Aldossari, EXPEC Computer Center, Saudi Arabia

This paper addresses the major challenges that large organizations face in protecting their valuable data. Some of these challenges include recovery objectives, data explosion, cost and the nature of data. The paper explores multiple methods of data protection at different storage levels. RAID disk arrays, snapshot technology, storage mirroring, and backup and archive strategies all are methods used by many large organizations to protect their data. The paper surveys several different enterprise-level backup and archive solutions in the market today and evaluates each solution based on certain criteria. The evaluation criteria cover all business needs and help to tackle the key issues related to data protection. Finally, this paper provides insight on data protection mechanisms and proposes guidelines that help organizations to choose the best backup and archive solutions.

Data Protection, Data Loss, Data Recovery, Backup, Archive