How to Select Backup Devices

There are many tools are available to back up data. Some are fast and high price,others are slow but very reliable. The solution that's helpful for your organization depends on many aspects, including the devices or tools capacities, ways and reliability. Can the backup hardware support the required load given your time and resource constraints?

First, the reliability of the backup hardware and media, can you afford to sacrifice reliability to meet budget or time fast?

Second, the extensibility of the backup solution. will this solution meet with your needs as the industrial grows?

Third, the speed with data how long it can be backed up and restored. nobody will afford to sacrifice speed to reduce costs.

Fourth, the cost of the backup solution. Does it fit into your budget?


Common Backup Solutions

Capacity, reliability, extensibility, speed, and cost are the issues driving your backup plan. If you understand how these issues affect your grganization, you'll be on the way to select an appropriate backup solution. Some of the most commonly used backup solutions include

Tape drives Tape drives are the most common backup devices. Tape drives use magnetic tape cartridges to store data. Magnetic tapes are relatively inexpensive but aren't highly reliable. Tapes can break or stretch. They can also lose information over time. Compared with other backup solutions, tape drives are fairly slow. Still, the point is the low cost.

Digital audio tape (DAT) drives DAT drives are quickly replacing standard tape drives as the favorable backup devices. DAT drives are more expensive than standard tape drives and tapes, but they offer more speed and high capacity. DAT drives that use 8 mm tapes can typically transmit more than 10 MB per minute and have capacities of 36 GB (with compression).

Auto-loader tape systems Auto-loader tape systems use a magazine of tapes to create extended backup volumes with capability of meeting with the high-capacity needs of the enterprise. With an auto-loader system, tapes within the magazine are automatically changed as needed during the backup or recovery process. Most auto-loader tape systems use DAT tapes. The typical system uses magazines with between 4 and 12 tapes. The main shortage to the systems is so expensive.

Magnetic optical drives Magnetic optical drives combine magnetic tape technology with optical lasers to create a more reliable backup solution than DAT. Magnetic optical drives use 3.5-inch and 5.25-inch disks that seem like floppies but are much thicker. Commonly, magnetic optical disks have capacities of 1 GB and 4 GB.

Tape jukeboxes Tape jukeboxes are similar to auto-loader tape systems. Jukeboxes use magnetic optical disks rather than DAT tapes to offer high-capacity solutions. These systems load and unload disks stored internally for backup and recovery operations. Their key drawback is the high cost.

Removable disks Such as Iomega Jaz, are increasingly being used as backup devices. It can offer good speed and ease of use for ingle system backup. However,both the disk drives and the removable disks are more expensive than standard tape or DAT drive solutions.

Disk drives Disk drives provide the fastest way to back up and restore files. With disk drives, you can often accomplish in minutes what takes a tape drive hours. So when business needs mandate a speedy recovery, nothing beats a disk drive. The drawbacks to disk drives, however, are relatively high costs and less extensibility.

Before you can use a backup device, you must install it or configure the equipment, when you have installed backup devices other than standard tape and DAT drives, you need to tell the operating system about the controller card and drivers that the backup device uses.

Buying and Using Tapes
Selecting a backup device is an important step toward implementing a backup and recovery plan. But you also need to purchase the tapes

or disks, that will allow you to implement your plan. The types of your backup devices you need depends on how much data you'll be backing up, how often you'll be backing up the data, and how long you'll need to keep additional datas.

The typical way to use backup tapes is to make a plan whereby you rotate through two or more sets of tapes. The idea is that you can increase tape longevity by reducing tape usage and at the same time reduce the number of tapes you need to make sure that you have historic data on hand.

One of the most common tape rotation schedules is the 10-tape rotation. With this rotation schedule, you use 10 tapes divided into two sets of 5 (one for each weekday).