A great example of why tapes don’t work
Iron Mountain have ‘lost‘ 2 truck loads of tapes in the space of a month. There’s a few reasons why this is a huge story and a significant hit to their customers business as well as their own.
The data on the tapes can be cracked, as they admit ‘using sophisticated equipment’, which really means someone with know-how can do it. Depending on what the data is, it may be used for all types of fraud by the thief, as well as the fact that the backup data copy is now gone and there a security hole to be plugged here until it is replicated again.
Of course if you have any sense you wouldn’t touch tape backup any more - it’s an antiquated technology. It rely’s on a poor medium, manual processes, and has logistical issues. Backing up on more reliable media like a redundant array of hard drives through a VPN in an off-site secure data centre makes much more sense. (heehee … and guess who can provide this for you? !!)
And the great thing about this Moore’s Law business is that the kind of system I just mentioned is not only FAR FAR better than tape backup, it’s also cheaper to do. Faster … more reliable … easier to access and restore … automated and secure : it boggles the mind that many CTO’s and SME’s still consider tape backup a viable solution.
July 6th, 2006 at 1:40 pm
However, on the plus side tapes don’t require ongoing power and cooling requirements and can be easily transported. Concerned about theft? A reasonable cypher (bluefish?) can generally protect most business data adequately. A tape robot combined with LTO technology makes a pretty compelling backup engine if all you need is disaster recovery capability.
July 7th, 2006 at 1:20 pm
Power and cooling are a minimal additional cost, and the advantages of automated off-site hard drive based backup I think far outweigh a non-technical SME’s relience on tape-backup procedures.
Also … tapes wouldn’t be great for a speedy disaster recovery!
September 18th, 2006 at 4:01 pm
[...] Nowadays, if you’re using SAN technology, you can normally take a snapshot of your data and copy it onto another part of your SAN array. Assuming you have enough storage, this is a good quick way of taking a reliable copy of your data. Of course, you may want to copy it onto another SAN at a remote location if you want a disaster-tolerant solution. A lot of commercial providers are starting to show up in this space, in Ireland we have companies like Central DataBank and Hosting365 (who wonder why anyone would use tape backup anymore). I guess there are pros and cons and I’d like to see a detailed cost-benefit analysis before I could definitively say that tape backup never makes sense - at least in countries like Ireland where broadband is still relatively expensive and the providers like to keep the Asymmetric in ADSL, it may not be economically viable to upload large amounts of data to a 3rd party backup provider. [...]