Last week, Gartner Inc. released a survey of 104 North American IT managers that found that 45 percent of respondents back up or replicate data to another disk, up from just 6 percent who did so in 2004. Yet 70 percent of the respondents who make backups said they do so to a local device, according to the September survey.

Companies should be sending their backup data to a distant, off-site facility that's owned either by the company or a storage service provider so that a local catastrophe doesn't wipe out both the original and backup copies, said Gartner analyst Adam Couture.

Some users are moving in the right direction. Dale Caldwell, a systems programmer at Grange Insurance Group in Seattle, said that until a year ago, his company performed nightly batch data backups that took 13 hours to complete and stored the tapes at an office in another part of the city. But after 9/11 and a recent spate of natural disasters, regulators pushed Grange to establish disaster recovery plans that involve replicating critical data to more-distant locations.

So Caldwell now replicates data from a virtual tape library (VTL) in Grange's main data center to a center in Spokane, Wash., 230 miles away. He said he's using a VTL controller from Bus-Tech Inc. in Burlington, Mass., to store and retrieve mainframe tape data sets, eliminating most of his tape infrastructure.

"The [off-site replication] has been really wonderful. There's a lot of time savings to it," Caldwell said.