The audience represented a wide variety of organizations: small/medium sized businesses, education, government, enterprise and global organizations. “Replicate backup data to a service provider/public cloud.” 13%.“Replicate backup data to another data center.” 35%.“Send tapes offsite – there has to be a better way!” 26%.“Send tapes offsite – we are happy with this.” 17%.One of the questions asked was “How do you move backup data offsite for DR purposes?” Here were the possible responses along with the percentages showing how the audience answered: I also did an informal survey in a session I hosted at VMworld in 2013. Now I suppose some of this could be blamed on the administrator (me), but I am guessing many of you have experienced similar pain. The other 40% consisted of troubleshooting, retrying the restore, recalling more tapes, etc. Things worked as they should about 60% of the time. At that point, I knew a good chunk of my day would be spent retrieving the tapes, hoping the tapes actually contained the backup data I needed, and then performing the restore. Every time someone would request a restore from older, offsite tape media, I would cringe. I managed a backup solution (I won’t say which one) back in the day.
Tape does a pretty good job of addressing both of these items, but tape can be cumbersome, costly, and unreliable. Some (not all) organizations who use tape typically have one or both of these requirements: Backup data must be kept offsite for disaster recovery and/or backup data must be archived for compliance reasons. Before I answer that question and discuss a possible solution, I want to dig into why that question comes up fairly often.Īs I am sure you know, tape has been around for decades for a variety of reasons.
#USB BACKUP TAPE PC#
A few examples of this include the Onstream USB tape drive for PC tape backup and the Linear Tape-Open (LTO), an open-format storage technology for enterprise tape backup.One of the more common questions I get around vSphere Data Protection (VDP) and VDP Advanced is whether backup to tape is supported. This is why storage device manufacturers continue to develop and enhance tape storage technology by increasing its storage performance and capacity. In fact, most of the world’s information is stored on tape because of its high reliability. This makes it faster than sequential access.įor consumers and small business end users, tape backup is a very impractical solution, yet it continues to serve as an ideal storage solution for archiving and disaster recovery purposes for large organizations, or enterprise as part of a storage area network (SAN) solution. Random access storage accesses data at a random position in a sequence regardless of the sequence size. Because it is only capable of this kind of storage access, tape drives lose in terms of searching time when compared to disk drives, which use random access storage methods. This means that groups of stored data are accessed in a prearranged and methodical sequence, making it hard to selectively find data that may be in the middle of the tape spool. A tape drive uses a sequential access kind of storage. Tape backup started in the 1980s but was largely abandoned in favor of disk backup by the late 1990s because disks are faster and can store a lot more data.
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