We have been using different backup media starting from punch cards, magnetic tapes, floppy disks, CDs, hard-drives etc. Magnetic tape has been the preferred choice for backup administrators for a long time mainly because it is cost effective and convenient for offsite storage (long term storage). But how good is your tape?? Experts indicate that 50% of tape restorations fail. Tape failures might happen due to a lot of reasons like normal wear, accidental damage, environmental damage and winding errors. Also restoring from a tape is time consuming since it’s a sequential access device and not random access like disks.
Disks are more durable, scalable, offer better performance and faster backups and restores (esp. when restoring single files). Storage vendors introduce new disk to disk storage technologies each day like RAID, NAS, Removable disk solutions which allows disks to be used for both onsite and offsite storage.
Hard drives are available from capacities 40GB to 1TB and the prices of disks have been dropping over the last few years. Hard drives also come with a manufacturer's warranty of 3-5 years and are designed for mean time to failure (MTTF) of 1 million hours. This saves the end user a large amount of money which they might spend in replacing tapes every 6 to 9 months.
With the latest disk storage technologies and disks becoming cheaper, I strongly believe Disk to Disk solutions are eventually going to take over conventional tape backups.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
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