"There is a lack of people skilled in doing backups," Koshka says, and others agree.

Craig Tamlin, A/NZ country manager for Quantum, relates the story of a multinational's office in Papua New Guinea. "A field agent was put in charge of backups because he was the most technical person available. But he didn't understand the implications of what he was doing, and soon got sick of going to each machine in different offices and changing the tapes. He noticed that when each tape was full, the machine would spit it out. So he decided to put masking tape over the cassette feeder. Each time the tape was popped out, it just went straight back in again, to be written over again and again. A perfect solution, he thought, until he managed to save (and resave) a virus, so that when it came time to restore there was nothing but corrupted data."

Giddey endorses this concern: "90 percent of tape failure is because of data not being written to it in the first place." And Barker suggests that most faults in storage are found in people or software, not the hardware.

At least enterprises are actually backing up. "They'd be silly not to," Koshka says, but he quotes a recent survey that indicated 50 to 60 percent of SMEs are not backing up at all.

Of course, backing up is only part of the story. There is also recovery, which, in the long run, is far more important. A recovery can be the real problem or, as one vendor put it in describing incremental backups, "you get a faster backup, but it's a bugger to restore!"