Tape Backup

The Problems With A Backup Tape

It's great that know the importance of having a backup tape to keep your important data from disappearing off the face of the earth, but do you know that there is a chance that your backup tape may not be working properly.

It's a scary thought but if you are not testing your backups how do you know that they are actually doing their job. You don't and when you finally figure that out it's going to be too late. You are going to find out after you have a hard disk failure in your system and you go and get your tape and it's blank. Think of how horrible that would be, to have been doing the right things to protect your data and then finding that you haven't been doing what you thought you were.

Even the best backup systems in the world can face some type of failure. But if you are testing them then you have the ability to fix it before you really need it. You should begin testing your backup tapes every 30 days to ensure that your tape drive is operating correctly. You want to be sure that you are actually writing your files to the tape. This happens far to often.

Another big problem that causes backup tapes to fail is not cleaning them. Your tapes get dusty and this dust can destroy the delicate machines if not kept clean. Check with your manufacturer to see what their recommended cleaning is. There are plenty of tape drive cleaning kits are available to save you a lot of time and future problems that may occur.

Since we are on the topic of cleaning I want to remind you of something else that you might be neglecting. The backup tapes that you have created and are storing it's important that you are storing them safely. It's great that you are storing your tapes that you are certain that contain all of your files because you have been testing and cleaning your device every single month, but where are you storing them. You should be storing these tapes outside of your building at an off premise site. The reason this is important is because there is a chance that your building could go on fire, and if this were to happen you would lose both your computers and your tapes and you are left with nothing. Ultimately causes the downfall of your business. So keeping them off premise will ensure that your data is completely safe from harm.

These are all important steps to maintaining a proper backup tape, so begin your monthly checkups and cleaning so you can be safer from any errors that may occur in your backup tapes.