The September survey of 104 North American IT managers showed that 45 percent of respondents back up or replicate data to another disk, up from just 6 percent who did so in 2004. But 70 percent of the respondents who make backups do so to a local device.

Adam Couture, an analyst at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner, said that if companies hope to truly protect their data, they have to electronically copy it to an off-site facility either owned by the company or a service provider.

Dale Caldwell, a systems programmer at Grange Insurance Group in Seattle, said that until a year ago, his company performed nightly data backups to tape 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 the company to establish disaster recovery plans that include off-site data replication.

As a result, Caldwell chose to replicate data between a virtual tape library (VTL) in his main data center and one in an off-site location in Spokane, Wash. -- 230 miles away. He is 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.