Tape backups are an arcane concept in Backup and Disaster Recovery that has existed ever since IBM released the first tape drive in 1953. The advantage of tape backups lies in its ability to store humungous amount of data when compared to Floppy discs and other options. Floppy discs were introduced for commercial use in 1971 and were in visible existence until 2000. Compared to floppy discs, surely tape usage has been quite resilient considering that they continue to existing even after 60 years. The primary reason behind this is that backup to tapes were seen as highly cost effective. However, beneath the surface, there are risks lurking with tape backups which we want to bring to light here.
Security
A copy of the backup would be duplicated to LTO tapes and sent to Offsite Vaults. Physically moving tapes to off-site locations increases the risk of security and compliance.
Retention
The general theory is that data can be stored in tapes for a longer period of time (up to 15 Years). However the same tape drive may not be in pristine shape for 15 Years. Life of the tape drive as such depends on the write sessions. A tape drive has to be replaced every 6-8 months. Moreover, LTO 4 tapes cannot be used in LTO 7 Tape drives & vice versa. Tapes also have a tendency to stretch out over time, causing the quality of the data to deteriorate. Hence, restores could become problematic at a later point of time.
Degradation
Tapes are highly fragile, magnetic media subject to degradation from external conditions like heat, humidity, dust, mishandling, electromagnetic forces, and even routine wear & tear.
Business continuity / DR
At the time of DR, downtime would be much higher than anticipated. If there is a natural disaster and if you need the Tapes for DR restore from the offsite vault, just the transport of files during that period of calamity would be risky and may delay the process substantially..
Uncertainty of data integrity from Tape Backups
Backup to tapes requires data integrity checks after every backup job and unless complete verification of each backup needs to be performed (which takes as long as the backup itself), there’s no way to know for sure whether your backup is reliable.
Slower and Multiple write session
Tape uses the technology of ‘serial access’ to find a piece of data. This means that to find a specific piece of data, the tape reader has to start at the beginning of the tape and continue fast forwarding until it gets to the piece of data that needed. Finding and restoring individual documents can be a long, slow, and cumbersome process.
Concurrent jobs are therefore not possible, Either a Backup or Restore job can be performed at any one time. Deploying multiple tape drive in the RTL will then require additional licenses.
Exchange and Databases
File level Restore for Exchange, VM, Hyper-V and Databases are simply not possible from LTO Tapes. It requires a separate phase of staging to the disk environment.
If you want our opinion, just go for GFS option in our disk image based backups instead of falling back on tapes. To know about GFS option in Vembu Backup services, please shoot us an email: vembu-support@vembu.com
