I was recently asked the question “Is Tape Backup Obsolete now?” by a client when we were discussing what kind of backup system to implement in their new file server. As a manager with a great deal of technology experience and having always used tape for backup, he was very surprised that I was not recommending tape as part of their server upgrade.

In larger enterprises, tape is still an effective technology for backing up large volumes of data where multiple versions of the same data need to be stored in different locations. Even this application however, is somewhat obsoleted by NAS (Network Area Storage Systems) implementations that replicate volumes of data to different locations in real time or near real time. Still, it’s good to have this data offline and in generations of copies. Consider for example, how a virus could infect ALL copies of the data if all the data is online at once. The NAS protects from site failures but not from malicious code.

The other concern with tape is that it wears out. Most larger enterprises know this and cycle the tapes frequently enough that they replace them before failure. SMBs (Small/Medium businesses) have less time and resources to pay attention to these types of things [if they aren’t already Centrend customers that is ] Unfortunately sometimes when they need to restore data, the tape ends up looking like the one pictured at the right.

As an alternative to tape backup we are typically recommending online backup for offsite/disaster recovery purposes, while maintaining a local disk based backup for rapid recovery in the event of a total loss of disk. The benefits of this strategy are:

• Fully Automated - no tape rotation
• The cost of a tape backup system is a much larger investment. Tape drives are expensive and the media are expensive
• No risk of data corruption by virus (online encrypted backup is locked down)
• Disk restores are MUCH faster than even the fastest tape drives
• A hard drive based backup system lasts much longer than tape
• The server O/S can monitor the quality of the backup drive and notify when replacement is needed
Please contact me for a free assessment of your backup strategy and let us help you reduce costs and increase your piece of mind.

-Paul
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Paul LaFlamme
President & CEO
Centrend, Inc.
508-347-9550 x115