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Tape Drive Backup
1. Affordability: Endless Harware & Media Expenses
- Tape drives cost $350 to literally thousands;
- Most tapes cost at least $25-50 each. You need a minimum of 5 tapes for a Monday through Friday rotation plus an additional 4 tapes for weekly offsite rotations... totaling at least $225 in replaceable media alone!
- Tapes and drives can quickly become outdated and obsolete (connection, capacity, durability and updated technologies), especially if you don't clean them regularly. Experts recommend replacing tapes every year.
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2. Reliability: Failure-Prone Media and Drives
- Tapes are notoriously failure-prone, vulnerable to degradation by the environment (heat, sunlight, humidity, liquids, dust) and human mishandling (dropped, misplaced, etc.).
- Like other magnetic backup media, tapes are frequently damaged by electromagnetic fields emitted by TVs, monitors, speakers, etc.
- Tapes and drives often get stuck, worn out and broken. If they fail (they do frequently), you face extensive repair or replacement costs, and either prolonged downtime or a more costly emergency service.
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3. Data Protection: Not Offsite is Not Alright
- Unless they're taken offsite every night (which rarely happens regularly), tape drives fail to protect data offsite against natural disasters (fire, flood, hurricane, tornado, lightning, solar flares and earthquakes), not to mention theft, disgruntled employees and sabotage.
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4. Data Security: Portable Media = Inherent Risks
- Where do you store your backup tapes -- a safety deposit box, a glove compartment, a purse, a night stand, or you don't know?
- Is your data encrypted or even password protected?
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5. Convenience: Install, Admin & Storage Demands
- Tape drive installation is expensive, and needs to be performed properly by qualified technicians who typically earn $50 - 200 per hour.
- Daily tape backup administration is time-consuming and cumbersome manual process requiring constant human interaction (loading, rotating tapes, monitoring, etc.) and requires a highly qualified and focused professional, unless you have an auto-loader tape library ($40K?).
- Since tapes are extremely vulnerable to environmental hazards, they should be stored in expensive climate-controlled locations.
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6. Tape Capacity: A Deceptive Figure
- Tape manufacturers typically advertise capacities between 4 and 20 GB, but that figure is based on maximum compression and considerably exaggerated. Many of your large files are already compressed as much as possible (zip files, video and graphics).
- Most tapes are built for specific drives, so if you run out of space in your tape rotation, you may need to upgrade to a new drive and tapes.
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7. Remote File Access: Network-Only
- Unless you have a dedicated file server with an attached tape library, you can't readily access data stored on your tape drives. Even then, you can't access it through the Web, only through your local network.
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8. File Versioning: Complicated and Unreliable
- Retrieving versions across multiple tapes can be complicated, time consuming and unreliable.
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9. Full System Backup: Cumbersome, Failure Prone
- You can back up your entire system using a tape drive, but recovery typically is an extremely cumbersome, time intensive and failure-prone process involving a matrix of tapes, files and versions.
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10. Support: Hiring High-Paid Professionals
- Do you have a tape drive recovery service to call if your in-house backup solution fails? How much do they charge?
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