Answers

"What happens if a Jumbo crashes onto your data centre/office? Where is your data then?"

A good DR strategy incorporates replication to a location far enough away to not be a factor in your risk profile (i.e. if you are in a flood zone, someplace outside the flood zone, for power failure, you want to replicate to a location in a different grid, etc)

"What if the net goes down. What if you have a major natural disaster . lets take e October 17, 1989, Loma Prieta, California. That earth quake knocked alot of telecommunication lines down. What do you do if you need to do a restore but you local back up is messed up and the net is down ??. There will always be a need for tapes for local and off site back up."

First, in 1989, your best option was tape backup. Secondly, if telecommunications are down you have an increased risk of no power as well so attempting local recovery is futile (think of your Exchange servers for instance... after the 4+ hours it would take to get your offsite tapes back and restored, with no telecommunications you have no email and no business gets done). As I stated above, your DR site should be outside your risk profile. Earthquake hits, automated failover to your DR site picks up near instananeously and you are still in business. Also, with FalconStor CDP, you will have a local copy of the data for whatever window you want (24 hours, 1 week, 1 month - you chose).

"So does CDP know enough to "bundle" associated writes?"

I'll have to get an answer for you this since I'm not sure what you mean by "bundle" associated writes. I can tell you that I have never seen a FS corruption when doing a restore on our servers.

One other note...

I'm not claiming that you never need backup or tape. I think most people would argue that tape is an excellent archiving media. I would argue that the methodology for conventional backup is out of date and doesn't reflect the increasing demands for data restoration within 2 hours to a point in time less than 8 hours old.

I know some manufacturing facilities that are not tech driven and they can produce widgets whether their servers are up or down. 24 hours for RPO and RTO is not a big deal to them so conventional backup meets their business requirements. Many businesses, however, rely on their servers and applications to be functioning and have a low tolerance for an outage of greater than 4 hours.

One last point...

Tape is NOT a DR solution and was never intended to be - it is a backup and archiving medium.