Most enterprises backup their data on a regular basis and stored those backups for some amount of time.
But, beyond restoring last day’s backup or part of a previous recent backup, are these backups real useful? Will they be useful 3, 4, 5 or 10 years from now?
Nowadays, the tendency is to virtualize almost every machine which increases the probability of a successful restore in the future. But some software packages come with timed and online checking licenses and one might end up with a successful restore of an unusable system.
And what if the hardware to run the system (virtualized or not) no longer exists?
The solution is to backup the business data (instead of the system data) in a interoperable format like XML (that can contain both data and metadata).
The added benefit beyond disaster recovery is system or application migrations.
That doesn’t mean that systems don’t need to be backed up. They do, but only for operational purposes.