Burmeister: In general, moving parts and moving laptops don't go together well. If you're using a laptop, try not to move it around while it's actually running.

Johnson: Between 60 percent and 70 percent of the drives we receive have to go into the clean room, which means they are having physical problems. To avoid that, we talk about backing up, but one of the things that's most commonly missed is verifying that backups work. We get calls all the time from customers who say, "When I went to my backup, it didn't back up the right volume," or "The tape drive wasn't working."

How successful are you at recovering from tape?

Burmeister: A lot of those are one- or two-read errors, and we can usually recover that without much difficulty. The others are human errors, when people accidentally erase the tape. These are more complex and difficult. Formatting the wrong tapes is the most common [problem] by far. The other one is they back up over a tape that has information on it. The general thing is, they back up the wrong data.

When is a problem beyond the scope of the self-service tools, and how do users know when to use them and when not to?