Tape backup allows the user to have their redundant copy of backup data in magnetic tape and is one of the best practices to maintain an archival data storage and an offsite copy. Tape backups are the long-established way to store backups in long term and are less prone to disasters. Post any system crash or major disaster, the retrieval of data can be done easily with tape backups. Tape drive is the data storage that reads and writes data on a magnetic tape, tape backup provides sequential access to data storage, unlike the hard disk drives which provide direct access.
Why venture with Tape Backups ?
The usage of tapes has declined over the years with the big screens to hard disk drives, but it doesn’t sound like the end of the tape. LTO tapes (Linear Tape-Open) is having a steady growth and has moved to its eighth generation of tapes, still business users and enterprises move forward for high capacity tapes and libraries.
General Tape types :
LTO – Linear Tape-Open (LTO)
DLT-S – Digital Linear Tape
DAT – Digital Audio Tape
AIT – Advanced Intelligent Tape
QIC – Quarter inch cartridge
Tape media generally astounds user with its favorable unit cost and the long archival stability. Tape backup is the best way to transfer a large amount of data where time isn’t critical. They are highly scalable, all that a user needs to do is simply buy and add more tapes to the library.
Tape autoloader is a cut above of standalone tape drives, it comes with a single tape drive, multiple tape cartridges and accessor to automatically change the tape cartridges during read/write operations. It overcomes the standalone tape drives manual process of loading and unloading the tape cartridges.
Tape libraries consist of multiple tape drives and a number of cartridge slots, they are designed to handle one or more tapes, it is an automated method to load tape cartridges. Tape library uses the barcode scanner to identify the specific tape cartridges and perform the read or write operation.
Virtual Tape System
As Tape backups give sequential access to data, recovery of data from tape becomes quite slow and tedious. But when it is automated with appropriate software, considering the speed it achieves continuous data transfer rates of up to 140 MB/s compared to hard disk drives. Virtual tape system is data storage virtualization technology that utilizes the virtual tape library to reduce the amount of tape disk required. This works as physical magnetic tape storage but it uses hard disks storage or another storage medium to effectively store the archival data.
The virtual tape library, virtualizing the disk storage as a magnetic tape which brings the integration of VTL with existing backup software. Virtual tape system brings the storage consolidation and faster data restore processes. Tape backup is a traditional way of backing up a large quantity of data and retains it for the longer period of time. Every medium and long term backup software support tape backup.
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