Data Backup: Disk Versus Tape
By now you know full well that the only smart, sensible, intelligent thing to do is to back up your data onto disk. Tape is for the birds, outdated and hardly sexy, Even the word ‘Tape’ sounds old. Yes, disk is definitely the way to go. Except, it’s not.
The gospel of disk has been preached for so long now that disk seems to be the inevitable choice for backup technology. But insiders throughout the tech world say there still are plenty of reasons to backup with tape.
Mainly this is for security and how well each form factor can ultimately survive while being moved around. The USB disk should perhaps be the most concerning, ultimately a basic USB disk, if lost can be plugged into anyones PC and restored. A tape on the other hand requires the same drive, and the password to restore. As far as portability goes, a tape is inert, has no electronics in side and can survive a harsher life than its USB hard disk counterpart.
Fragile disk inside, NOT FOR PORTABLE USE
said Frank Westerheim, president of a technology services company.
Maybe a small business is backing up data ‘just-in-case,’ keeping files locked in a vault or taking off site as part of a daily backup routine on the off chance they might be needed down the road, Westerheim explained. Or a business might virtually mirror a whole system every night in order to restore data and applications immediately in case of disaster.
Two Different Needs, Two Different Solutions
Suppose a small business wants to protect its data and intellectual property. The company may never look at these archived items again, but they still need to keep them just in case. Tape is still the way to go for this kind of deep archiving. It’s cheap, easy to handle, secure, inert, and it can be stored safely in a vault off premises.
Backing up to hard disk, on the other hand, fulfills a different need.
said Barry Hammond, Director of sales and marketing at a Data Protection Solution company.
“All a tape does is store data, whereas a virtualised backup can take a complete image of your OS, your settings and your applications,” Hammond said. Provided the company has invested in the software to take virtual snapshots or ‘virtualise’ in the first place then a disk fills this kind of backup need. And there’s no reason these different types of backup can’t coexist.
There is also the question of speed, Many small companies have cheap off the shelf portable USB hard drives designed for single personal us, not for Enterprise backup.
Hammond said. Do you want your backup to complete in one night? Tape drives have evolved to become very fast; for example, the recently released LTO-5 is capable of writing at 280 MBps (assuming 2:1 compression) which will outperform disk by a long way, particularly as cheaper lower-tier disk such as USB/SATA is normally chosen for backup. They will also hold more. LTO5 Has a native capacity of 1.5tb and a compressed maximum of 3tb. And with LTO 6, 7 & 8 planned with a total backup capacity of 12.8tb or 25tb compresses its certainly not going away.
Welcome, then, to the same old balancing act. The pundits may have promised that disk storage would solve all your problems, but nothing’s ever that simple — especially technology. Tape and disk both have their respective virtues, and depending on your needs it is entirely possible that you’ll ultimately find that an tape based archive is the start and progressing to disk based snapshots when budget allows.
