[CLUE-Tech] Tape Drives - why?

[dperkins at techangle.com]

That sounds reasonable.  The data is backed up on a separate medium, and
even better, is also stored in a different building.  Loss of data due to
fire, etc., is minimized.

I have known companies to do local backups to a second drive every four
hours, and a daily backup from that drive once a day.  The daily backup is
done to the company mainframe in another city and the data transfer was
slow, so they adopted a two-step approach to backup.

> I for one have had terrible experiences with tape backups.  I once
> acquired
> a brand-new tape backup system and using a brand-new tape, I completely
> backed up a system AND successfully verified the tape backup.  When I went
> to do a complete restore the same day, the tape reported read errors and
> even with multiple attempts to do the restore, I ended up loosing the data
> and having to rebuild the system as best I could from other backup media
> (CD's, floppies, etc).  Needless to say, after that experience, I haven't
> trusted tape backups.
>
> Another example of tape backups that didn't work as planned was a major
> corporation that backed up all its mainframe master files to tape.  They
> had for several years used XYZ tape drives with no major reported
> problems.
> Then some manager, seizing the opportunity to save a buck, decided his
> corporation could save significant $$$'s by substituting tape drives from
> company ABC (also a major tape drive manufacturer) for the one's currently
> being leased from XYZ.  Within one week of making the swap, 10 master file
> tapes had been destroyed and the project was abandoned at a substantial
> cost to the corporation.  Guess this shows that hardware consistancy
> should
> also be taken into consideration when performing backups.
>
> As to the discussion of tapes being easier to take offsite - what about
> taking backups or mirroring data on spare hard drives - then transmitting
> them to another site -perhaps even an independent vendor that offers disk
> space to house files and are themselves responsible for taking backups of
> their systems with your data?  Wouldn't this negate the issues of
> transport
> and storage?
>
> Gary
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Match Grun" <match at dimensional.com>
> To: <clue-tech at clue.denver.co.us>
> Sent: Friday, July 30, 2004 12:41 AM
> Subject: Re: [CLUE-Tech] Tape Drives - why?
>
>
>> With all this talk of backups... So you all take backups to your chosen
>> media. How many of you have done a restore from backups? I guess that
>> very few have. How reliable have you restores from backups been?
>>
>> Match
>>
>> On Thu, 29 Jul 2004 17:17:53 -0600
>> David Anselmi <anselmi at anselmi.us> wrote:
>>
>> > David L. Willson wrote:
>> >
>> > > OK, I'm no newbie, and I find myself asking the same damn question
>> > > every time I get into the Backup & Disaster Recovery design process.
>> > >  Why does any
>> > > business with less than a TB of data to backup use tapes?  Why, why,
>> > > why, when almost any fixed disk media is much cheaper and almost as
>> > > easy to take offsite?
>> >
>> > In one office, I was using CDs.  When I outgrew that, I switched to
>> > external USB drives.  This is nightly full backups taken off site
>> > every day.  It happens to work in this case.
>> >
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