Backup is essential for your business and with the abundant number of features available in the backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity market, it’s hard to believe tape is still being used as a backup option. But there are people who just won’t give it up.
Tape has been around since the beginning of computers and predates hard drives by a significant number of years. But, with the increase in speed and capacity of hard drives, tape backup has fallen out of favour.
Here are a few of the issues you may encounter if you are using backup tape for your backup and disaster recovery.
The need of human interaction
If you’re using tapes for your company’s backup and need any data stored on the tape drive, you have to be physically present at the office to obtain it.
Reduced frequency of backup – you can see the issues with that. No frequent backup, no way of recovering a file you just deleted by mistake.
Disaster recovery – This could be a tough one. Natural disasters can happen and that will result in you losing all your data. Because of that it is strongly recommended that you use an offsite location for storing your data.
Time consuming
Tape restore can take hours, days or even weeks when it comes to recovery time. Your time is valuable.
Maintenance
You also need to make sure to maintain the tape drive and tapes, because just like a videotape, they can deteriorate without proper care due to climate conditions.
Thankfully, Online Backup has taken over the marketplace.
Online Backup offers a modern alternative to the more traditional tape backup solutions. By backing up data continuously onto a remote server via an internet connection the risk of data loss as a result of file corruption, fire, theft or natural disaster is practically eliminated.
Data recovery made easy
When a crisis hits, the value of a decent backup strategy becomes apparent.
In the case where files require to be restored, your IT company or someone inside your company has the ability to restore files within minutes. A typical file restore takes approximately 5 minutes from start to finish.
Our Online Backup solution, for example keeps a copy of the daily backup files on a 90-day rolling basis. This means that you can go back up to 90 days in relation to changes that have been made to files stored using online backup.
Saving Time
Many of our clients’ state that saving time with online data backup solution is the main factor for them in choosing online backup.
Combination of both
If you really want, you can use a combination of both tape and cloud bandwidth. This is called a hybrid backup solution, and it would allow you to have your archived files stored on tape drives while recent files are always available through the cloud.
So, with all being said, if you have a choice, we recommend you just say NO to tape!
Get in Touch with our Disaster Recovery Expert and Learn How We can Secure Your Network and Protect Your Business!
