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Tape Vs DVD Backup

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by araspa

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Hi there,

We recommend to small business that use our program/database what backup to use.

More and more we are finding that they want DVD-R as a solution. Personally I dont think that DVD-R is a valid business backup medium but im looking for YOUR Pro's and Con's re this.

(By the way our database is 4 gig max)

That do you think / recommend and why
Why is one better over the other.

Tape Vs DVD(R)

Cheers
Anthony

5 replies

by djent

Backing up your data is only part of a backup stratagy. A failed or corrupted drive may take many hours to rebuild before data can be restored. Although your primary concern may only be the database the customers concern is getting back in operation ASAP. Tape backup allows disaster recovery, redundancy and unattended backup as a TOTAL solution. Other means may be used in addition but tape should be the primary option.

by araspa

I agree with your sentiments but for our situation it might not apply.

We are a software house and only concerned with our database. The rest of the customers needs are by their HW supplier and people they purchased the HW off. If any grievences were to arise they have contracts with these people that will bring down a new server or fix the problem. BUT ... if the data corrupts (even if it was due to HW) we have to fix it and/or restore it.

Therefore is DVD better? I personally do not think so but have to vaildate my reasons .. hence this post, to see what people in our IT industry think.

by nicholasclayg

As the business landscape moves forward some technologies do not. Tape is a good example of this. For the business, I would heavily consider staying with tape as it is the total solution for a business. The reason is that tape can hold vast amounts of data, 50gb and up ( i hear there is a new 900gb tape floating around but I have heard nada on it thus far) Tape can be a very good tool if you follow basic guidelines

1) Store the tape offsite (what good is back up if your office burns down with the tape inside)

2) rotate your tapes, every 2 weeks to one month rotate tape and inspect older tape.

3)keep tape cool, its not a fashion statement its fact. Tape that gets hot isnt very happy and will not cooperate with you with getting data back if some parts of the tape are heat damaged. A COOL TAPE IS A HAPPY TAPE

4)Define your back up strat- is it incremental every day,differential, full, or partial?

ok gotta run got to go deal with an angry VP. lol

by hal 9000

I can remember a case where a Government department used tape here and they had a security officer perform the daily backup. Beside not knowing a single thing about computers he was hopeless but he did as instructed and inserted the tape in the drive pushed the necessary buttons and then made sure that the tape was running then went on his rounds. When the server failed 6 months latter they just grabed their lattest Backup and tried to recover only thing is most of it was garbage as the tape drive had only been running for a few minutes/seconds before shutting down hence 6 months worth of work wasn't backed up.

I know this isn't so much a computer problem as a user problem but it is fairly common amoungst a lot of places they just get the person who has the considered least to do to perform these little jobs as they don't have the time themselves so it does fall into the IT section's hands to recover from there mess after wards.

The system broke down here because the person involved wasn't there and couldn't hear the tape drive not running but otherwise it was a brilliant backup system with always at least 2 copies of the lattest days work off site so in the event of something terrible happening they could be up and running in a very short time. Well that was the plan.

by hal 9000

DVD would be a viable alternative and a lot faster than Tape but the down side would have to be cost and the as yet nonstandary quality of DVD.

Although recently for single layer this has drasticly improved but only when the Dual Layer DVD's came out and the cicle started all over again.

But providing that the D'Base is limited to a max of 4 GIG I can see DVD as an alternative particuarly when the speed factor is taken into account. Even the fastest SCSI tape drives can't match DVD in this area and they aren't all that cheap either. But I suspose it's Horses for Courses and what each indivual company is confortable with but DVD has the advantage in the small to medinum sized companies where they don't have an inhouse IT provider.

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