Most UK users deploy more than one backup product

UK customers routinely have more than one backup product in use and for most this is to maintain peace of mind.

Many use more than one backup product for different environments and consider the biggest headaches to be the time they take and uncertainty over whether they will work.

Those are the findings of a survey commissioned by Manchester-based backup supplier, Macrium, which questioned more than 500 UK backup product users.

The survey found that while 49% of those surveyed have only one backup product in use, 33% have two backup products installed. Meanwhile, 16% have three or more in place.

Key reasons for having more than one backup product in use include: Added security (30%); using different backup products for different purposes (21%); comparing backup products (15%); and ensuring redundancy (5%).

What these results reflect is that customers usually have a number of data protection methods in operation. These are likely to include traditional backup products such as those from the big players such as Symantec, EMC, HP, IBM and TSM, that deal with physical and virtual backups, but users often have specialist virtual backup tools in place such as Veeam.

Macrium found respondents likely to supplement backup with data protection methods such as replication and snapshots. In a small number of cases, businesses that have undergone mergers and/or acquisitions were likely to have more than one backup environment in place.

The biggest headaches with backup were cited as the time they take (22%), and uncertainty over whether the backup would be successful (17%).

The survey asked which methods of backup were in use. The most common method is to carry out full and incremental backups (36%); followed by grandfather-father-son (33%); and then solely full backups (13%).