Tape vs Cloud vs? 1

[jaymaechtlen]

Greetings...
I see lots of discussion of backup and DR, doing mirroring to alternate sites and backing up to cloud rather than tape.
Yet, I see that tape vendors are still out there, offering multi-Terabyte tape cartridges.
What do you think? Anyone staying with tape, upgrading or even moving back to tape?
Regards
Jay

 

[goombawaho]

Tape is somewhat passe. It has been replaced by NAS units or other hard drive based backup solutions for LOCAL backups. Cloud backups can replace tape or disk based local backup completely or as a second layer of protection.

Personally, I recommend a local backup and a cloud backup. So you can use tape, hard drive, memory stick, etc. for the local backup and then something like Mozy for cloud backup. Local backup is great for super quick restores but it is vulnerable to theft/fire/flood.

If you have other sites with the bandwidth to mirror data to another site, then there's your cloud backup in effect.

Link

"Living tomorrow is everyone's sorrow.
Modern man's daydreams have turned into nightmares.

 

[technome]

To add...Agree with Goombawaho, tape and cloud would be a good backup system. If you have multiple terabytes of data, the cost from cloud backup providers is high. If so your better off building your own offsite system, using VPN and a NAS such as below. Personally I still rely on tape systems heavily. Full mirroring to alternate sites gets expensive/complicated

http://www.buffalotech.com/products/network-storage

........................................
Chernobyl disaster..a must see pictorial

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"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."
Popular Mechanics, 1949

 

[cabraun]

As long as tape remains the least expensive and fastest backup target, it will never die and I am just fine with that.

 

[goombawaho]

Fastest - tape is not as fast a good disk-based system for sure.

Tapes do die and that's why a lot of people don't like them. I've seen them wrap themselves up inside your drive (triple trouble). Tapes can fail when you really need them OR people use the same tape for 5 years and the backup on it is useless - never tested. "When to replace a backup tape" - hard to tell.

Cloud backup is expensive but so is losing your data. It all comes down to cost vs. speed vs. disaster proofing

Most important thing is that some form of backup is offsite. I don't care if you put a memory stick in your pocket if it has all your important data on it.

Second most important thing - Periodically test your ability to restore your most important information regardless of the method of backup.

"Living tomorrow is everyone's sorrow.
Modern man's daydreams have turned into nightmares.

 

[cabraun]

I seem to average between 3.75-4TB / hr writing to my 6 X LTO6 drive library. Much faster than what most people would get with a backup to disk target which is typically not an SSD array but more often some array of NL-SAS drives.

Granted reading and restoring from disk is considerably faster with disk, but I think for most people tape will out perform disk as a write target.

 

[jaymaechtlen]

Thanks - I appreciate the info!

 

[Martin999]

Tape has its place in my view.

Sure tapes can fail, but if looked after properly - written to above the streaming speed to avoid 'shoe-shining', handled and packed correctly if moved etc ... they can be very reliable.

... but I would agree, they can still fail, but, then again so can disks, and the disadvantage here, is that a disk takes many more backups with it.
Multiple copies good, but consider for example, faulty hardware causes disk corruption, and this is replicated across to the other disk, you can still lose everything.

Can that happen, yes, I've seen it - the company lost 5.5 million pounds in revenue due to the downtime of two sets of disks getting corrupted, fortunately the tape copy was fine (though took a while to restore).

Cloud generally isn't being used by 'big' companies, too slow, compliance issues, no control over the experience of the people looking after it (ie the cloud vendors employees). What if they go out of business, this has happened certainly with one cloud vendor.

The trick with backups, is multiple copies, and in my view, at least one copy to tape.