The Real Facts About Tape Backup

I want to first start off by saying something very important and I want you to read these words very carefully, "Don't trust tape backups". Did you get that. This is a sad fact. They always seem to fail when you need them the most, and that is the time you find out that they had some type of failure for some time.

As you can probably tell by my animosity that I have experienced this problem first hand. It wasn't one of my best days, actually it wasn't one of the best months at all. It caused my business big trouble and I lost a lot of money and time because of it. There was so much time and effort that went into rebuilding what was lost.

You need to perform monthly checkups on your tape backup device. Neglecting to make sure that your data is actually being stored on your tape can be a devastating event if something ended up happening to your computer. Imagine this scenario, your computer crashes and your upset about it but your happy that you have your tape backups. So you begin trying to download you data from your backups, but your tapes are blank. There's absolutely nothing there, so now you begin to panic. This is not a far-fetched thought, and it happens more often then you would probably want to know.

You need to be sure that you are performing a weekly or monthly cleaning on your tape backup device. The dust that piles on your equipment can cause your equipment not to function correctly. And you may not even know that it's not working correctly. And that little scenario that we went over before will be all to true.

It is a good idea that you clean your equipment and perform the checkup of your tape device at the same time. Doing them both together and at the same time of the month will make it easier to remember. Mark the date on your calendar if that will make it easier, but you must do both of these at minimum every single month.

There are times even the most careful person can make a mistake that can cause many problems. Such as using the wrong days tape, it's easy to pick up the wrong tape without knowing and this will ruin the data for that tape.

I may have been too harsh with the whole "Don't trust tape backups". They can be dependable if you are taking proper precautions. But before you rush into purchasing a tape backup look into the other available solutions, such as an external hard drive, second hard drive or an online storage service.

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