The Ur-Guru pointed me to a January 23rd post on Engadget announcing IBM’s development of a 35-terabyte magnetic tape. That’s impressively huge, all right, but the first thing that crossed my mind was: tape is a linear medium. How long is it going to take to find and restore any particular file stored on a tape that large?

Okay, so they’re not really longer, just denser, but seriously—how does this address all the age-old problems with tape? It may remain a good option for large enterprises, especially if they’re configured for it already, but it’s way too much fuss and trouble for the average SOHO user.

This is a guest column by Jeff Mordkowitz, The Profit Coach. Jeff is the first person I’ve talked to who not only uses tape backup in a SOHO setting, but likes it. Most of what we hear about tape these days is unflattering, so I thought it was important to include the other side of the story.

None of the manufacturers listed below is paying me a commission for including them, and I don’t believe they’re paying Jeff, either.

I love the tape backup system I put together for my home office. I guess I learned about the necessity and convenience of a tape-based disaster recovery/business continuity system from my old days in the NYC world of finance (banking). It’s not hard to do and addresses the needs I have for professional protection for my small business.

I use a four week (daily, weekly and monthly) “progressive” tape backup system (only files that have changed since the last backup are copied). The tapes are labeled A, B, C and D (one for each week). Each Sunday I clean the drive and swap in the next tape. The software tells me if I’ve put in the wrong tape. Tapes B, C and D are completely overwritten with each usage. Tape A is pulled out of rotation every four weeks for approximately three months (to have a quarterly backup) and once a year (to have an annual backup).

The system is set up to read after write (compare what was written to the tape to what was on the disk, and as mentioned, it also backs up open files). When the backup is finished, it sends me a nightly email with the previous evening’s backup status.

I back up my DATA folder, a few small folders in Program Files that have key setup options, and Documents and Settings. FYI, don’t forget to run Office 2003 Save Settings Wizard every couple of weeks if you use Microsoft Office. You will lose almost all custom settings if you don’t .(Office 2007 doesn’t have this option yet.)

I also restore a few files weekly to test the system. The old cliché, “You don’t have a backup system until you’ve verified a restore,” rings true here too.

I keep my daily tapes in another room in a fire-proof, water-proof box and my “A” tapes go to a safe deposit box in a local bank periodically. Fires, floods, water main breaks, hurricanes, brush fires, gas leaks (and of course disk crashes) occur regularly in different parts of the country. How long will you have a business (or a happy spouse and family) without any or all of your data? And, without doing a rotation, you can’t retrieve multiple earlier versions of your files. (Oops!)

Equipment (Don’t let the list prices scare you off.)

Software:	I use EMC’s Retrospect for Windows Single Server Edition (v7.5) with the Open File Backup add-on (a necessary add-on IMHO)
Hardware:	Three Dell computers (one laptop and two desktops cabled (100MB CAT 5 wire) to a Linksys WRT300N Router)
Tape Drive:	Seagate STT3401A 20/40GB TRAVAN Internal Tape Drive
Storage Media:	Imation TRAVAN 40GB TR7 20/40GB Data Tape Cartridge
Drive Cleaning Media:	Imation TRAVAN NS Dry Process Head Cleaning Cartridge, 30 Cleanings.
Protective Storage:	Sentry Safe 1 hour Fire-Safe and Waterproof Chest, 0.36 Cubic Feet

If you have any questions, I work as a Business Coach and you can call me at 917-579-7652, email me at Jeff@TheProfitCoach.net or visit my website at www.TheProfitCoach.net. Here’s to protecting our data!

The one caveat I would add is that to make this work, you need to manage the tape rotation manually. For some people, that’s not a problem. I have a friend who’s never used backup software because she’s scrupulous about copying her data into backup folders and then transferring it into archive folders. (And she has a Mac, so creating a system image is fairly easy for her.)

Combined with the safe and the safe-deposit box, and the regular verification of backups, there’s no reason tape can’t be a workable solution. (And notice that it only takes one tape drive to back up three computers.)

Thanks again to Peter Shankman and Help A Reporter Out.

P.S. Be sure you bolt the safe to the wall or bury it in the ground if it’s small enough to be carried off by thieves.

In his August 15 post Rethinking backup, ZDNet‘s Paul Murphy suggests replacing standard tape drives with a combination of RAID array and DVD superdrive. “The cash savings are obvious but other things may be more important. For example, high quality DVDs outlast tapes, cost less, and require less storage space.”

It’s true, people talk a lot about the 30 year shelf life of tape, and DVDs, like CDs, are sometimes subject to “rot.” But if you’re actually using tapes instead of keeping them on shelves, they wear out very quickly, getting stretched, tangled, etc—just like audio cassette tapes.

To make the proposed solution really successful, however, a company would have to determine which data really needed backing up. A tape holds a lot more data than a DVD, even though going through multiple DVDs to recover data might be faster than going through a single tape. And no one seems to have found a way to automate what Murphy calls “Just the Facts, Ma’am” backup: “a super automated diff[erential backup] that stored just the changes in those files.”

Readers have written in with a number of suggestions, including Intelligent Disk Backup from Net Integration Technologies. Many object that without the software to sort and compact the data, the proposed solution isn’t really a solution.

The tone of the discussion starts to deteriorate after a while, but there is an important lesson in this. The easiest way to back up is sort of like the quickest way to move house: throw everything you have into boxes and put it on the truck. But that means you need a bigger truck–and maybe even a bigger house to move into. There’s a trade-off between the simplicity of backing up your whole drive and the storage space it takes to do that.

If you only have a handful of computers, you can probably get them all backed up onto one external drive, but then again, that depends on the computers. A handful of computers like mine would easily fit on one good-sized XHD. A handful of the Ur-Guru’s computers, on the other hand, need something more.

If you have storage space to spare, then you don’t have to worry about compressing or selecting the data you back up. If not, you need to determine priorities. Maybe all the data that really matters would fit on a single DVD.

1. Re-examine your process for disposing of backup tapes.
2. Encrypt the data on your tapes.
3. Don’t let junior staff members handle the backups.
4. Store backup tapes in more than one location.
5. Be alert when transporting tapes—this is when the data is most vulnerable.
6. Look into other forms of storage.
7. Audit your tapes and maintain records.

1. Not using commercial courier services like FedEx to ship your tapes
2. Encrypting your tapes so that whatever happens, nothing confidential will get into the wrong hands.