• Backup Practices
  • Backup Bookmarks
  • Backup Software
  • Data Loss & Theft
  • External Drives
  • Online Backup
  • Reviews
  • Tutorials
  • Website Backups

FileSlinger Backup Blog

  • Home
  • About
  • Contact
  • Blog
  • E-zine
  • Questions?
  • Review Policy
  • Comment Policy
  • Disclosures

Tape Wars: "I'm not dead yet!"

July 1, 2005 by Sallie Goetsch Leave a Comment

I keep seeing more items about tape in magazines and online, so I thought I should post a few of them.

Computer Technology Review‘s most recent print issue (or the most recent one to reach me, anyway) has a story headlined “Tape is Here to Stay.” Why? According to the author, Rich Harada, president of the Tape Technology Council (and therefore perhaps just a little biased, as are the disk-based-backup manufacturers proclaiming tape’s demise), tape remains the least expensive way to add storage capacity—at least if you have a tape system in place already. Disk-based backup systems are “perfect complements to tape subsystems” and tape is “the most adaptive storage technology for over 50 years.”

Well, maybe, but that doesn’t absolve it of all the problems people have had with it. I don’t know any small-business users who prefer tapes to hard disks or optical disks as a backup medium. The gentleman protests too much, methinks.

If your company is committed to tape (and the cost of setting up an automated tape backup system for large quantities of data amounts to quite a commitment), you might want to follow some of the suggestions made in a couple of other recent articles.

From Baseline‘s June issue come Briana Hallstrom’s 7 Steps for keeping tabs on your backup tapes (slightly abbreviated by yours truly):

  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.
I’m not sure step 6 counts as a tip for managing tapes, but the others seem like sound, even obvious advice, and beg the question “Why aren’t companies doing this already?”

And on Monday Curtis Preston wrote an opinion piece for Computerworld called “A Simple Solution for Lost Tapes,” in which he recommends:

  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.
There will always be some hackers good enough to break any code, but it seems to me that the least you can do is keep the amateurs out. And if you’re looking to start a career in computing, the tape-encryption business is booming.

To read other FileSlinger™ Backup Blog posts about this subject, type “tape” into the search box at the top of the right column.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)

Related

Filed Under: Tape Backup

Comments

  1. Tape4Backup says

    December 5, 2008 at 6:49 am

    Ultrium:Nice Work all the information is very helpful keep it up.ST4B1Tape4backup.com

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Search

Google Ads

Categories

  • Announcements
  • Archiving
  • Backup Bookmarks
  • Backup Devices
  • Backup Practices
  • Backup Software
  • CD & DVD Backups
  • Data Loss & Theft
  • Data Recovery
  • Drive Failure
  • Drive Imaging
  • E-mail Backups
  • Events
  • External Drives
  • Flash Drives
  • Guest Bloggers
  • Hardware Failure
  • Humor
  • Mac Backups
  • Mobile Backup
  • Network Storage
  • Offsite Backups
  • Online Backup
  • RAID
  • Removable Drives
  • Reviews
  • Storage
  • Tape Backup
  • Traveling Backups
  • Tutorials
  • Website Backups

Tags

Elsewhere

  • BACN
  • East Bay WordPress Meetup
  • Rhymes with Sketch
  • The Author-izer
  • WP Fangirl

Find Sallie Online

Backup Poll

When was the last time you backed up your computer?

View Results

Loading ... Loading ...
  • Polls Archive

Tags

.MAC Acronis Amazon S3 annual archive backup Backup Bookmarks BACN Bart-PE Buffalo carbon copy cloner Carbonite CloudBerry Cloud Computing Coding Horror CrashPlan disaster recovery Dmailer DriveImage DriveSavers Dropbox DVD Flickr Ghost Google Docs Iron Mountain Karen's Replicator LinkedIn LiveVault Maxtor Memeo Mozy RAID Rebit reminder Retrospect Seagate social backup Spare Backup SyncBack SyncBack Freeware Titan Backup WordPress XHD year-end backup Zoogmo

Copyright © 2023 · Metro Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in