Maximize protection for tape backups

In general Mike's strategy sounds ok, but there are no provisions for disaster recovery. When disaster strikes his available backup might be 2 weeks old (according to Murphy's law it will happen when he does his weekly full backup before the former version is sent to the off-site vault). I suggest making a copy of each backup tape in the morning and have it sent to the vault.
And I would like to add a remark on special systems like RAIT or double-drives that stripe data on several drives. Theyare useless when disaster strikes unless your backup provider has identical systems running right now. Don't rely on a contract to have them supplied when necessary, it won't work.

I for one would not have any backup at the site. We store all our backups offiste. I think that incase disastor strikes which could make the site inaccessible for instance at least we would have the latest data available offsite.

We use GFS and make full backup every night. The tape stays in the office during working hours to facilitate the recovery of any data that we might need during the day. At closing time we remove the Last back up to a remote location. The tape needed the next day ismade available on site the next morning. This way the maximum backup us offsite. Unfortunately we do not have access to Vaults but I think that this is safe enough. We anticipate and plan for localised disaster. If the whole City is distroyed then Iam not sure if there would be anyone avaibale to restore anything.

Replies to today's article on data backup and recovery are correct in stating that off-site storage of backed up data is a must for effective disaster recovery. Second, maintaining an archive of previous versions of data is also a requirement in order to recover from data loss or corruption that may take hours or days to discover. A good resource on this topic is at U.S. Data Trust (usdatatrust.com).

Mike never discusses online backups. This is a superior method of backing up data, especially for small to medium size companies. No media to buy, rotate, retire or replace. No hardware or software to buy or upgrade. No labor. It always gets backed up, it always goes offsite. Best of all you can actually restore your data and do it without a big hassle. You simply select the file you want, click, enter a password, click and your done. A minute or two (sometime seconds) your file is back where it should be.

You mention DLT and LTO tape technologies. Why not AIT?