According to a recent study by the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley, 1 and 2 exabytes of unique information per year are generated world wide. That amounts to approximately 250 megabytes per person. Currently, magnetic storage is the medium of choice for our data, which is only growing in capacity as demand rises. In fact, corporate reference data demands leap by 60 percent each year. So how are you keeping up with the demand? If you're like most IT departments, you're still using the "weekly full, daily incremental" backup scenario that's been used since the 1950s. If it ain't broken, don't fix it, right? In this case, however, what doesn't appear to be broken could be the weakest link in your data management chain.

Symantec has developed a twenty-page white paper describing the weaknesses in the typical data storage structures, and offers look at a better approach. Go here to download the paper.