You’re going to be hearing a lot on backups in the coming weeks, a favorite topic and one that often is ignored by business owners. Besides the work you perform on your systems, backups are the most important thing you can do to ensure longevity of the business.

 

Studies show that over 50% of businesses fail in the first year after a significant data loss. Today’s topic is on the media that your backup is being stored on. Many people are doing backup to tape and this is not good! Tape is the most unreliable media for backups.

 

Many times when people go to retrieve from a tape they find out they can’t. Even tapes that verify ok (this means that the backup is verified as being written correctly to the tape) sometimes can’t be retrieved. We at H&D had to deal with tape for 15 years on countless systems and to keep it simple, it was a real pain in the *ss. Sorry for the cussing, but that’s how much of a pain tape was.

 

We moved to hard disk-based backups a number of years ago, and this medium is not only reliable and fast, it can (when properly implemented) give a business continuity in a disaster as well as backing up your precious data. In addition, pushing data offsite (unlike taking tapes home) is easy, seamless and cost effective. More on disk based backups in my next post…