Earthblog

Tape backup drives were once the standard for backing up company data--mainly because there were no other viable alternatives. Their primary virtue was that the tape cartridges themselves were relatively durable and convenient to store offsite. And that was about their only virtue. I started providing tech support for small business about 12 years ago, back in days of Windows 98, Windows NT4 Server, and the dreaded Travan tape drive.

The "Travan" tape drive of days gone by. . .

These devices were slowwww. God forbid you ever found yourself in the unenviable position of actually having to restore gigabytes of your company data from one of these devices. It was a grueling, nail-biting experience, and it was basically a toss-up as to whether the data would even restore. I had one experience where the tape actually despooled inside the drive, creating a nest of magnetic spagetti in the works.

Tape drives have definitely improved a lot over the last decade, becoming faster and more dependable. But tape is still tape, and even the best tape drives tend to be unduly prone to failures. It's the nature of the technology, an old technology. When was the last time you listened to your favorite album from a casette?

The native backup program for Windows Small Business Server 2008 (the de facto standard server operating system for small business) no longer even supports tape drives as backup destinations. This doesn't mean that you can't use your current tape backup solution with Windows Small Business Server 2008. It only means that the backup program Microsoft provides natively and at no extra cost with Small Business Server will not recognize that device. This is Microsoft’s not-so-subtle way of telling you that you currently have an outdated and unviable technology and they are no longer willing to support it.

The biggest problem with tape backup drives for small and midsized companies is that they provide the illusion of data security, not the reality. By “security” I mean how confident are you, as a small business owner, that your critical company data is safe from loss due to hardware failure, software corruption, natural disaster, malicious intent, or just plain bad luck? 
 

So why not go with a tape backup solution?

First and foremost, in addition to the reasons above, you’ll need to decide which member of your company is going to be the trusted custodian of the backup tapes—your most critical and confidential company data. Unfortunately this task typically falls upon the worst-paid member of your organization, the individual with the least investment in your company, the job most prone to frequent turn-over. In actual practice, perishable backup tapes do not get rotated or replaced with any disciplined regularity, they are rarely stored offsite in any meaningful security sense, and the entire backup scenario falls by the wayside, out of sight and out of mind.

Why spend so much money on a solution destined for failure?

The fatal flaw with tape as a viable backup solution for your small or midsized company is that it is dependent on entirely too much human intervention and is therefore prone to entirely too much human error or neglect.

Not to mention the purely technical issues with tape backup drives: slow, temperamental, error-prone, and unduly expensive. 
 

What then are the alternatives?

Backing up company data to an external hard drive or a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device is a good and econimical practice, but it is only half the equation. In practice it's not practical or advisable to store hard disks offsite. They are simply too delicate and vulnerable to the environment in which they are stored. The best solution for small and midsized companies is to backup company data both locally (say, to an external hard drive or NAS) and offiste through an online backup service provider. These are companies that will charge you a monthly fee, depending on how much storage space you need, to store copies of your company data securely on their remote servers, over an Internet connection. So let's say that if your company ever experiences a burglery, fire, flood, etc, and your local backups are destroyed as a result, you still have copies of your data at a different and unaffected location.

A solution like this (see iBackup demo below) can provide provide the reality of data security, rather than merely the illusion of it.