Offsite tape storage has been one of the cornerstones for many businesses in terms of disaster recovery plans, and with the advent of increasing legal obligations to shareholders it is still a key way of protecting your business. This article provides an overview of why tape backup tape is still a viable option.
The purpose of using offsite tape storage is to maintain a recoverable copy of your IT systems in a location outside of your main place of business in case some disaster happens to the company. Disasters such as an over voltage event to the building or flooding following a burst water main can rapidly result in all your computer systems going down.
Tape storage has traditionally been the favored way of backing up system in spite of how slow it can be to generate backups and restore from tape. However, backup tape is reliable, safe and is very cheap currently so it is easy to maintain several generations of internal systems at a relatively low cost.
When looking at choosing an offsite tape storage facility/company there are a couple of things to look out for. The first is any legal obligations that may exist regarding the data protection of your data. If your backup tapes are storing public information (e.g. government systems) then the offsite tape storage facility will need to comply with these regulations.
Secondly, the location of the facility is critical to your disaster recovery plan. It needs to be far enough away so that it won’t be affected by the same climactic conditions that could impact your firm, while still near enough to drive should you need to retrieve backup tapes in a lower severity incident (e.g. to recover lost data following a power out).
Lastly, you should always test out the offsite tape storage facility with a dummy run restore from tapes to a main or auxiliary back up system. There is nothing worse than finding out your backup tapes are not usable with your existing tape reading devices.