Tape Backup Software
Tape backup software has seen its heyday, and is in the twilight of its utility for a majority of businesses. For decades, tape has reigned supreme as the standard backup medium for corporations and those with larger data stores to secure. The advent of faster high speed connectivity and the rapidly declining costs of hard disk storage space spell out the imminent demise for tape backup systems and tape backup software.
Like with any technological shift, there will be holdouts that cling to the outmoded technology for many reasons. Among these reasons are likely to be the amount of money they invested in the tape backup software and hardware, their comfort level in working with tape drives and tape backup apparatus, and reasons of nostalgia that make absolutely no technical or business sense whatsoever. With each passing day, the divide between the disk backup software and the tape backup software camps is more clearly drawn.
Are there Pros and Cons to tape backup and tape backup software? Perhaps. Some claim that tape backup is cheap, but the price difference between tape and hard disk storage is getting narrower every day. Not too long ago, a 10 gigabyte hard disk cost a fortune and a tape/tape drive combination was seen as cost-effective. Today that's not the case at all.
The Cons of tape backup are plentiful and well know. Tape is slow, due to sequential access that is inherent to the media. A user must wind or re-wind the tape to get to the data they may need and if it's a big tape, that can take forever - a hard disk has random access capability - and can jump to the needed data set immediately. The failure rates of tape restores are notorious in any industry, as is the finicky and expensive-to-maintain nature of the hardware involved.
You see, tape involves many manual processes and is a comparatively fragile storage medium. Combine these two factors and you have a recipe for disappointment. Even with the best tape backup software, someone has to administer the processes, handle the tapes, and ensure that they are taken to a safe, offsite location each night. Many times, there is a breakdown in one or more of these components that renders the backups useless.
The real threat in tape backups and tape backup software is that in many cases, the critical flaws are not detected until it is time to restore data - when it is too late. If you are considering tape backup software, try RBackup Online Backup software. It is the state of the art in data protection, and can be deployed with a much lower overhead than a tape backup system. It is completely automated, natively ships data offsite nightly, and contains robust reporting as to the session durations and content.
Contact one of our representatives for an informative overview of our products and costs today.
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