No matter how you look at it, breaking up is not typically an easy thing to do. If you currently use a tape drive as your method of backup it is time for you to come to terms with the reasons why it is just no good for your business. Often times outweighing the pros and cons is helpful in a situation like this. Here are four important reasons why your business would be better off saying goodbye to it’s tape drive:
1. Your tape drive is a cheater. Here you are, faithfully swapping tapes and taking them home every day (at least you do most of the time), feeling secure that your data is safe and that you could be back up and running again fast in the event of a disaster, right? Wrong! While your tape drive does backup your whole server, legacy backup software makes it difficult to recover the whole server. Access to your software programs, network settings, printer and Internet configurations may be difficult to recover from a tape based system. That means if your server were to go up in flames (or simply fails) you would have to find all your software disks and authentication codes and rebuild your server.
Finding these items during a crisis can be difficult and time consuming not to mention that recovering from a tape drive can be slow when compared to recovering from a disk-based backup system.
That task could take several days costing you a lot of money and lost time. Thanks to vast improvements in backup technology, you can actually have a system that automatically backs up your entire server through a process called “imaging” which simply means it backs up an exact replica of your server. You benefit because if your server failed, a replacement server could be set up and delivered in hours and would retain all your settings and software. Plus, no more swapping tapes- everything happens automatically.
2.Your tape drive will abandon you when you need it most. You can only retrieve the data from your tape with a compatible tape drive. If you ever had a tape drive more than 2 years, it may be a phased out model, no longer available to order. This could mean that when you need to recover your data, you are unable to, even if the data is there.
3. You could lose an entire day’s worth of work. Ever lose an hour’s worth of work or a document because Word crashed? Now imagine losing an entire day’s worth of work. Frustrating, huh? Since tape drives can’t perform open file or continuous backups, if your system crashes at the end of the day, all of the documents, entries and work you (and your entire staff) completed that day are toast. And if Murphy’s Law applies, that would be the day you hammered through a grueling 30-page report.
Newer virtual backup systems will take a snapshot of your server every 30 minutes, saving your work from going into Never-Neverland. Plus, if you leave files open at night when you leave for the day (and we all do that occasionally), it will back up those files too.
4. You can’t trust a tape drive. Tapes have an average failure rate of 100% – that means they all fail at some point, it is just a matter of when. You also have to remember to swap out tapes everyday, this leaves room for human error.
The bottom line: Tape drives are antiquated and an incredibly unpredictable way of backing up your company’s data. That’s why we urge all our clients to “break up” with their old tape drives and upgrade to Digerati Group’s Backup and Disaster Recovery program.
Not only is it very affordable, but it will continuously back up your entire server – including open documents – every 15 minutes so you don’t have to lose a day’s worth of work. Then every night it will automatically backup a snapshot of your entire server off-site where it will be kept safe and secure until you need it.
No more swapping tapes, unpleasant surprises that your backups weren’t working, and no risk of being down for days trying to recover data from old tape drives. Plus you’ll gain the peace of mind that your data could be recovered fast in the event of a server meltdown or disaster.
Call us for a free estimate on switching over to a backup system that you can actually be in love with.
(312) 360-1900
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