Disk vs Tape Backup – which should we use?
We currently use a tape backup system in our office, but we are constantly having to replace the tapes and tape drives and in this era of digital media, memory and ‘cloud’ storage it seems archaic to backup our files to a technology that was invented in a technology that has been around for decades (if not more than a century!).
I recently read an interesting post on High Scalability discussing the benefits of both tape and disk backup, and was very surprised to read that Google’s Gmail uses tape backups as a last resort to store their data. Data from three data centers became corrupted due to a software bug and it was only from the tape backup that they were able to restore the data.
So, I think there are three main options for us when we replace our backup system:
1: Continue using tape backups
2: Use a local disk backup
3: Use a remote (or ‘cloud’) disk backup system
Luckily (to date) we haven’t had to rely on a backup (except when I’ve permanently deleted something by accident!) but the reasons for using them are obvious.
We aren’t Google (you may have noticed!!) and don’t have massive amounts of data to backup but the data we do have is vital to our company and its loss could be catastrophic so we still need some kind of fall back if something did happen to our server and data.
So, we wanted to find out what your recommendations would be? What system do you use to backup your data? Do you use a combination of methods? Have you ever encountered any problems with a certain method of backup?
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