One reason why backup is so bad.

Here is a fun question to ask just about any computer user....

"You backup your computer, right?  If a file is accidentally deleted, what does your backup do?"

The answer you will most likely get is, "ah, nothing."  

Then you can ask them,

"What does backup do if you don't notice a file is lost soon enough?"

The experienced users will say, "It will eventually throw away my only good copy of the data!"

Is this a good thing?  Is this the state of the art of backup?  Yep.  It is sad to say that when something changes on a file system, it could either be a valid change or a corruption but backup has no way to tell the difference.  It simply ignores this and keeps making copies of the file system.

Every backup system will eventually need to recycle the capacity used (no one has infinite capacity) so it is quite likely that if a user doesn't notice a problem, backup will, by design, destroy the last valid copy of your data.

This is how all backup system works today and is nowhere near what customers want. (Yes, even the snapshot-based backups, and don't even get me started about Continuous Data Protection...)

Even small computers have hundreds of thousands of files on them.  Do you mean to tell me that the entire backup industry relies on the hope that some human will miraculously notice a problem and see it soon enough to manually start the restore to get the file back?  Yea, right...

What information users really want is a system that is smart enough to immediately save a copy of the asset when a valid change is made, but also immediately restore it from the "backup" if a corruption or deletion happens. 

I can tell you from personal experience that this feature of Information Asset Management is the most fun to demonstrate.  We have nicknamed the demo the "fat finger" demo.  We show the user that even bypassing all the security, one can still delete the file.  However, in just a second or two, the file automatically reappears.   (We also log the fact that the file had to be restored and tell someone that a restore happened).

This is just one example of the power of Information Asset Management.  This problem has been a part of every backup product since the invention of backup products.  Isn't it about time someone fixed it?