Well, as long as you can recover from an onsite backup after logging into your system and completely destroying everything you can, it counts.
An incremental snapshot to a remote is as good as a backup as WD users just found out.
>The point where the backup is made could have a zero-day propagate to the tape machine
Again, the point here is the failure of the backup is decoupled from the failure of your system.
Again, everything is on a spectrum, and we can argue about definitions, however, a copy on a hard drive that's sitting on your bookshelf is decoupled from whatever happens to your computer unless both get destroyed (or stolen) - and that's how good that backup solution is.
The data on a RAID array will go poof if you accidentally rm -rf that partition, so the chances of it failing when the system fails are very high. Hence it's an awful backup solution.
What you have to consider is not whether the chances of failure are high or low, but where the chances of failure of both the system and the backup at the same time are non-negligible.
An incremental snapshot to a remote is as good as a backup as WD users just found out.
>The point where the backup is made could have a zero-day propagate to the tape machine
Again, the point here is the failure of the backup is decoupled from the failure of your system.
Again, everything is on a spectrum, and we can argue about definitions, however, a copy on a hard drive that's sitting on your bookshelf is decoupled from whatever happens to your computer unless both get destroyed (or stolen) - and that's how good that backup solution is.
The data on a RAID array will go poof if you accidentally rm -rf that partition, so the chances of it failing when the system fails are very high. Hence it's an awful backup solution.
What you have to consider is not whether the chances of failure are high or low, but where the chances of failure of both the system and the backup at the same time are non-negligible.