Is Tape Backup Really Your Best Solution?

With the recent advances in backup technology, there is an alternative to the conventional tape backup systems, which may contain many hidden risks and dangers. Several organizations have reported that a large percentage of the tape backup jobs contain errors and many others do not even test the restore function of the backups on a regular basis. For those who do, are they often find in horror that their disaster recovery capabilities are in jeopardy. As such, most experts agree that the tapequickly to a low quality media for backing up data. Moreover, this approach requires significant manual intervention in addition to the need to be physically moved offsite. In many cases this means the person that IT is the backup tape home --- Yikes!

Organizations that are truly concerned about their data quickly evaluate alternative solutions. More and more companies consider online backup services from third parties. In the same way thatReplace storage area networks (SAN) file server, is superfluous Online Backup Tape Backup. The reasons are a significant reduction in disk storage costs, a significant increase in bandwidth speeds and significantly improved security and recovery capabilities. However, the real benefit of online storage is flexibility for automatic backup of your data to an offsite data center and give your end-users with immediate access to files that need to be restored. Even aFile as small as a single e-mail can be quickly and safely restored. Now, contrast this with a need to wait for tape backup approach, where end-users to hours or days is to find and recover a single e-mail. If you need to send an e-mail, which approach do you prefer to relax?

Be implemented in addition to faster recovery times can be an online backup solution is relatively simple. Automatic backups of your servers and desktops can be configured to a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device, in definedIntervals (eg every 15 minutes for e-mail and transactional databases, once a day) for other data. The NAS device is similar to a server containing a disk array to encrypt all of your backup files, and the hold function as a traffic manager and transfer your data over the Internet to the offsite data center. At this point you will actually have two backups, one on the NAS device and one at the offsite data center. An additional copy of your backup can also be sent toa redundant system in a catastrophic event occurs at one of the data centers.

The price of using an online service provider is very reasonable, although there can be significant price differences on the market. In general, prices should be in the $ 5 - $ 10 per compressed terabyte (TB), per month range. Some providers charge for uncompressed versus compressed data, which can result in a large variance in the cost of your solution, since most of the data is compressed as much as 50%.There is still some confusion in the market to make this problem so you understand, before all the variables.

Finally, increased legal, compliance and legal issues must be considered when organizations safeguard their sensitive and critical data. For many an organization, an online backup solution was the rescue in a disaster. Let's hope you never need it!