The most frequently used backup media for small and medium businesses today is the magnetic tape. In fact, this has been the case ever since the tape drive was invented in the fifties by IBM scientists. This is because tapes are robust and portable, the cost per megabyte is low, and the technology has proved reliable.
Tape has been ideal for long-term off-site storage of data which is of secondary importance and, so, unlikely to be accessed again. Tape is also widely used to back up and restore applications which may be lost in the event of system failure.
What’s more, tape is the preferred medium for many who don’t want to change their backup processes and infrastructure in order to accommodate disk-to-disk backup.
But disk-based backup and recovery are gaining ground today. This is because of changes in the business and the IT environment. While the volume of data that needs to be backed up and recovered continues to grow, the time available to do this in, remains the same or shrinks. Organisations want to speed up the restoration of their data and the recovery of their applications. While tape is unlikely to become redundant in the future, all is not roses in
Tape in Trouble?
Ontrack Data Recovery, a data recovery and computer forensics expert, claims in a report that companies in the
Why do tape backups pose such a risk if they are so popular as backup media for small and medium-sized businesses? Because, says Ontrack, while tapes are an excellent backup medium, companies rarely check whether these backups are up to date and accessible, and whether the correct data is being backed up. When a data disaster occurs, it’s too late for recovery. In fact, 40 to 50% of tape backups fail when it comes to recovering the data that companies really want. So, if constant updates are not made, one is left with obsolete data.
Senior Director of Software and Services at Ontrack, Jim Reinert, says, “Every year, Ontrack recovers data from thousands of tapes—data that the business thought was fine until they tested it.”
President of MPAK Technologies, Mike Kornblum, has this to say: “Tape is still a viable solution for many small to medium-size businesses. The problem that we encounter frequently is that backup strategies are dependent upon a single system administrator or are based on a manual process.” He points out that because of heavy workloads, system administrators are unable to back up daily.
Kornblum adds, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. It is so much less expensive and complex to put a backup strategy in place than to try and reconstruct data in the event of a hardware failure or catastrophe. The essence of business is data.”
And what about corrupted data? Tapes are vulnerable to corruption through mishandling, and operational error. Says Reinert, “Accidental overwrites, due to inserting or partially formatting the wrong tape, are not uncommon. Just because you perform a regular process to back up your systems doesn’t mean that your data is safe.”
Dirty drives, using the tape past its “use by” date, and broken tape are other reasons for the failure of data backups. And there’s more: even software and system upgrades can make data unrecoverable. He elaborates, “If you’ve changed your systems, check that the data stored on tape can still be accessed given that it may have been created by different applications or servers.”
According to Reinert, yet another reason for failure is due to the improper storage of tapes. There is no guarantee of safety in this business. Off-site storage of data is essential in a disaster recovery plan, but even sites may be hit by disaster. “The best plan for offsite storage,” he says, “is to utilize multiple storage locations that are as far away from the main office as logistically feasible.”
The Virtual Tape Library
With the introduction of the virtual tape library in recent years, disk-based backup took a big leap ahead.
A virtual tape library is an archival backup solution. A blend of the traditional tape backup method and low-cost disk technology, VTL offers an optimised backup and recovery solution.
But now, some users and analysts claim that the technology may already be on its way out.
Systems Integration Manager at benefits provider, CitiStreet, Jeff Machols says, "In the short term, the need to emulate tape is important. Long term, I see the need to emulate tape diminishing; the actual emulation of tape and robotic libraries was merely a way to get in the door for the VTL."
According to Machols, the lure of virtual tape libraries lies in their ability to provide companies with disk to disk backup without having to change their backup software or procedures, which are designed to write to tape. "Organizations are going to want to start taking advantage of more and more disk-to-disk functionality and will probably be willing to switch software if one product has a richer feature set supporting disk-based systems."
Whatever it may be, as Mark Stewart, backup administrator from the Randolph Air Force Base in