Almost a year ago, we began recommending a new backup strategy. This was based on years of frustration with tape drives and backup software. We spent a significant amount of time and energy researching and evaluating options and eventually settled on a hybrid service that placed an intelligent backup appliance on the network and couples that with imaging technology, virtualization and off-site backup.
Well, I can say with absolutely zero hesitation that this was the right thing to do for our clients. We still struggle with tape backups and we never have an issue with our new appliance based service. It's that simple. To add even more proof to the puzzle, we still have to babysit various tape backups and we are losing all confidence in their reliability. Even when the backup software reports successful backups, we are not confident the data is available for restoration. It's simply too cumbersome and expensive to continually test and troubleshoot tape based backup solutions. We know this based on hard fact and experience.
If you are still relying on a tape backup solution, run, don't walk, to a new solution. Tapes are simply terrible and not reliable enough for today's critically important data protection needs. As if to add insult to injury, tapes are also horribly slow to restore from. You may have good data backed up on tape, but prepared to wait a while to get it back.
If you're at all unclear how I feel about tape, I don't like it. I am however, very enthusiastic and confident in our new backup offerings and I welcome any inquiries about why I feel so strongly about it. Here's hoping you never have to rely on your backup to recover data, but if you do, here's really hoping you have a reliable system in place.
