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We’ve covered before the importance and the ways to backup your data, but one option that seems to have been forgotten in a lot of businesses is backing up to tape for offsite storage. I wasn’t giving it much thought either. Here’s my take on tapes now.

So you’ve already Identified Your Data, Determined Your Storage Options, and found some Software that you like using. You like the hard drive option, but you’ve also heard that while external hard drives are relatively inexpensive these days, they can fail and don’t have as long a shelf life as you’d like.

Well it is true that in order to keep an external hard drive in working order, it needs to be turned on and the files accessed every once in a while. Add to that the cables and weight of some of the options out there, and you might start looking for another option. Enter tape backup.

Now some of you might be thinking, “I thought tapes were slow and small. Didn’t tape backups go our with VCRs?”. Well I held the same opinion not so long ago too. And I was proven wrong. Tape backup units and tapes themselves are keeping up with the capacity needed by large businesses to this day. And they’re not as slow as you might think. Add to that a shelf life of around 30 years for a tape holding data and a price tag that is complimentary with most external hard drives, and you’ve got yourself a nice off-site backup solution.

We recently installed an HP 1/8G LTO-4 Ultra 1760 SAS Autoloader library. Basically this device is one tape drive with two 4-tape magazine trays and a robotic loader. The tapes used are LTO-4 tapes which store up to 800GB of uncompressed data and up to 1.6TB compressed at a 2:1 ratio (obviously since 800*2=1600).

Now we have a lot of data to backup - well into the double digit TerraBytes uncompressed. We have a large storage array that our servers backup to and then those backups are copied onto tape for offsite rotation. Currently the tape backup unit isn’t attached directly to the storage array (this will be changed very soon), so that means the backed up data has to be sent over the network to the server with the autoloader. Here’s a rundown of how we’ve got it working:

• The backup of the server runs after hours, storing the data on our storage array. This allows keeps the backup process from slowing down any machine that might be heavily used during business hours
• The copy job, which copies that backup to tape, can run at any hour during the week. Currently I try to have this run after hours too because of the need to transfer it over the network.
• Tapes are rotated offsite every week so that in case of emergency, our data would be, at the most, 1 week old. And with the onsite storage array, backups are quickly and easily accessible for little to moderate sized emergencies.

So there’s a little peak and opinion on adding tapes to your backup options. Maybe it’s something your business needs, maybe it isn’t. Weigh the options and find out what will work best for you and give your business the best protection for the money.