What's Wrong with Tape?

Tape Backup has been the predominant backup media for almost 50 YEARS! And it's really starting to show its age. Today, we wouldn't even consider purchasing or storing your music on tape, so why do we trust it with our mission critical business data? Here's a list of common complaints about tape backup solutions we hear from our clients all the time:

Tapes Fail – fragile media
Tape Drives Fail
Outgrow the Tape (very hard to consistently get a good backup once they are spanning tapes)
Hard and time consuming to recover the entire system
Hard to backup remote users

Errors on restore
Open files not backed up
Hard and time consuming to retrieve a single file from backup
Offsite Tape Rotation a pain – time consuming and unreliable

There are other concerns as well, specifically in the area of disaster recovery and business continuity. This is a Top 3 Issue for CIOs. Recent Disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and 9/11 have brought this issue to the forefront of CIO's worries. And with 43% of all companies who experience a disaster never reopening, and 29% closing within 2 years, these worries are well founded.

Disk to Disk Backups use massive hard drive arrays to store your backup data. Typically, the goal is to provide a 30-day window of backups for your critical systems – this means, we can go back up to 30 days to find the data you need to restore, whether it's the complete system or just a file or two. This solution immediately relieves you of all issues regarding tape – the frailty, the size limitation, the mechanical issues around tape drive failure (hard drives are dramatically more reliable than tape drives), as well as drastically speeding up the backup and recovery times of your systems. Also, it's much easier to look for data in a D2D solution than in a stack of tapes.

Normally, with a traditional backup solution, to restore a backup, you must first return the system being restored to a normal state – configure the hardware, install & patch the operating system, and install and patch key applications. Only THEN can you restore the data itself. If your system was not well documented with settings, this can be a risky proposition. With an Image of a system, you eliminate the need to install the Operating System and Applications – Instead, we restore the ENTIRE system, block by block, to the hard drives.

In a traditional, tape backup environment, best practice tells us to have copies of our data, on tape, offsite. This is so we have a copy of our mission critical data that's not onsite, so we don't lose our original data and all our copies in the event of a site wide disaster. Unfortunately, many companies only go through the motions of having an offsite copy – the offsite tape is in an employee's purse, or in their car, or somewhere at their house, and there's little thought to the age of that data. Even companies that fully embrace the offsite copy concept must deal with the fact that they may need to wait for a tape to come back from their offsite data store (Iron Mountain or the like) before they can restore a missing file. Vaulting, on the other hand, maintains a system image over the Internet (or over a WAN connection to another office of your company). This image is maintained automatically by your backup solution. In the event of a site disaster, there's a current copy of your key systems offsite that you can get to over the Internet and that you can count on.

This technology applies to an age-old problem that there's been no good solution to – how do I back up those Road Warriors and Home Office Workers' systems? Online Backup uses new Bit-Level update technology to make Backups over the Internet viable.