Tape Drive Backups
For years IT professionals have been using tape backups as part of their disaster recovery solution for business. Backups using Tapes were more commonly found within very large corporations who could afford such a high end IT solutions but today the traditional tape backups can be found in small to medium sized businesses too.
Tape drives are technically known for being archival storage units as most data is backed up once daily, usually after business hours. Basically, data is copied from the system and written onto a Tape that connects to the Tape hardware drive.
There are various different Tape Drives available to connect to a system using SCSI, IDE, USB, FireWire, Fibre among other interfaces. Storage capacity can range from a small number of MB’s to over 800GB of data and there are various different Tape technology options on offer.
It is very common practice for a business to activate a Tape Backup on a nightly basis capturing all the data changes from that day. There is a problem with this, if a system crashes at say 5:30pm the company has lost a full day worth of data and for a business such as accountancy firms, this could be a very expensive loss.
There are by far too many businesses that regularly have staff remove a complete tape backup from the office and take it home each night. This method for off-site backup can leave a company prone to a data breach if the correct security proceedures are not in place. What would happen if the Tape was lost, damaged or even stolen? Data maybe encrypted but would you take that chance?
Below are just some of the pro’s and con’s of using tape drive backup solutions to give you some food for thought and although not everything is listed here they really should be taken into consideration before deploying a backup solution.
Pro’s of using Tape Backup
Established solution: As mentioned tape backups have been around for years so today there are many tape products available on the market.
Inexpensive: For a small business using tapes for backups can be an inexpensive solution. As technology moves on costs of products are dropping dramatically.
No IT admin required: Not every business has an IT person on site so backups are left to the staff that are not always skilled in using computers. Tape backups can be performed by almost anyone and are just as easy as burning data to a disc.
Onsite backup: Having immediate access to restorable data onsite is essential for any business so tape backups are a plus for many people who have experienced a sudden data loss.
Con’s of using Tape Backup
Unreliable: Tape cassettes are actually very delicate pieces of equipment so if they are not handled correctly then can easily become damaged or corrupt.
Rotating: Staff is left to rotate tapes manually on an evening basis so more time is needed by staff to perform the backups. Plus, relying on someone to perform a backup manually isn’t always reliable unless it’s their sole responsibility within the company.
Data breach vulnerability: Past events show us many of the data breaches reported are due to tapes either being stolen or lost. If a company doesn’t use the right procedures they are open to a data breach which can easily happen.
Before implementing tape drives as a business backup solution think very carefully of the worst case scenario.