Here’s Why Backing Up Your Data With Tape is Highly Inefficient

One of the most important technologies for any business is their data backup solution. Most companies cannot survive without their data. Is your data protected in the event of a disaster? How is your organization approaching this critical IT operation?

If you’re not backing up your data, then you’re rolling the dice with your company’s future. It’s only a matter of time before disaster strikes, whether it is a natural disaster causing physical damage to your office, hardware failure like a hard drive crash, a hack attack, malware, or any other of the many threats lurking on the Internet. As a business owner, you are well aware that you can’t get ahead without taking risks. However, nothing is to be gained by risking the integrity of your data.

Therefore, having any backup solution is better than having nothing at all; albeit, once you start shopping for a data backup solution for your company, you’ll quickly realize that you’ve got many options before you, and not all data backup solutions should be considered equal. Due to data backup being such a crucial component of your company’s operations, you want to go with your best option, which we feel is a Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) solution.

The alternative option is to go with a tape backup solution. Tape backup has been used by organizations to backup their data since the dawn of the computer age. To be fair, backing up with tape is reliable, but its usefulness has been far surpassed by BDR, thanks to BDR’s utilization of the cloud and its ultra-quick data recovery times. Additionally, the biggest selling point of tape backup has always been its price, but with cloud computing becoming more affordable than ever before, in several cases, tape backup no longer holds this advantage.

Perhaps the biggest advantage BDR has over tape backup is the fact that it’s an entirely automated, hands-off process. Compare this to backing up with tape where an employee must manually swap out full tapes for blank tapes, every day, as well as find a safe place to physically store them, which is often susceptible the same natural disasters as the rest of your office. In order to avoid downtime, this process is often done after hours, which makes it a rather resource-intensive task. Lastly, restoring from a tape is a cumbersome process. Depending on how much data your business requires, it could take anywhere from hours to days to complete the data restoration process.

Backing up with BDR is far superior. Take into consideration these three benefits that appeal to any continuity-minded business owner.

• Multiple backups per day: Instead of doing one big data backup at the end of the day, BDR takes multiple snapshots of your company’s data all throughout the workday. In many cases, these snapshots take place as often as every fifteen minutes. Given the fast pace of today’s business world, you know just how much your organization would be set back if even a couple of hours worth of data were to be unexpectedly erased.
• Rapid recovery speed: BDR takes advantage of the cloud. This makes recovering backed up data a breeze. Compared to tape backup where old tapes must first be manually retrieved and then restored (a process that could take hours), recovering your data with BDR is as easy as finding a working Internet connection (a process that can take mere minutes).
• A temporary server: In the event that a disaster takes out a server, your BDR solution can temporarily take its place while a solution is found (like waiting for a replacement part to be shipped), making it so that your business doesn’t skip a beat. Tape backup can’t come close to offering your business this kind of continuity.

To take full advantage of backing up your data with your very own BDR solution, give Computerware a call at (703) 821-8200.