For years the tape drive has been the mainstream in backup solutions. Tapes were always the least expensive and most portable solution for transferring large amounts of data.

Users have always had a love/hate relationship with tapes. They love them when they work but hate them when they need to be replaced daily. When you add the potential for erased data and sensitivity to environmental conditions most users given the opportunity would rather an alternative.

Even with all of its downfalls the tape drive still accounts for the majority of backup solutions in place for small and medium sized businesses. But that is beginning to change.

Increasing Capacity
Hard drive capacity has been steadily increasing at a rate higher than that of tape. With the advent of the digital media age, disk usage has reached levels unimaginable just a few years ago- when 146GB of space was a high end solution.

Servers are now coming with two, three or even four terabytes of data, terabytes being 1,024 Gigabytes also equal to 1,048,576 Megabytes. The cost of a tape drive to back up that much data would be more than the server itself, meaning a company can purchase a second file server for less than the cost of a tape drive to backup the original server.

Digital Age
Digital pictures are utilizing up to 3MB each and MP3 files have all but replaced CD’s as the preferred medium for music. But soon that may just be the tip of disk usage. Video cameras are now coming without tape and use hard drives as their storage medium. Given that these drives cannot be swapped out and stored long term it would be a logical conclusion that videos now need to be off loaded to your computer in order to preserve them for years to come. A single one hour of video can easily take up 12 to 20 gigabytes of disk space alone.

So What?
So you’re thinking to yourself, "well that’s fine for the home users but I run a business. I don’t use any of that digital media stuff." If you think this is the case you may want to take a closer look at your network. Dentists use digital images of X-Rays, insurance agents have digital images of claims, fisherman have digital images of today’s catch for auction, construction crews have images of their job site, alarm companies have images and video of surveillance. Most every industry has started finding valid reasons to store more and more information on their computer system. Yours will probably not be far behind.

Our White Knight has Some Tarnish
So what are businesses doing to backup large amounts of data? Currently the most popular solutions involve some form of Network Attached Storage device. A NAS device is a large collection of hard drives in a chassis that has a basic operating system (typically Linux) which attaches to your network. These devices can easily handle two Terabytes of data and can be purchased to go much larger. Your servers redirect their nightly backup to the NAS device for backup. These devices are also relatively inexpensive to purchase and maintain.

The upside with NAS devices is they are cost efficient and can handle large amounts of data. The downside is that all of your data still resides on site. If something happens to your building (fire, flood etc), there’s no backup.

Off Site Services
Enter the off data service market. Chances are you’ve heard or seen advertisements about off data services but weren’t sure quite what they were or why you would need them. These companies take your data and automatically send it off site to a secure location in another part of the country. They accomplish this by transferring only the data that has changed since the last transmission. With these services in place you have both on site and off site data replication, but also a few concerns to address.

Constant Cost
Unlike the tape and NAS solutions, off site services have on going costs. You are also charged according to the amount of data you store, so costs typically increase over time rather than stay constant or decrease.

Internet Speeds
The functionality of these services is highly dependent on your Internet speed. If you have slow or average Internet speed you may not have sufficient bandwidth to handle the nightly transfer of all of your data. This may force you to select only certain amounts of data for offsite storage. Keep in mind that speed refers to upload speed which is usually significantly slower than the published download speed of your connection.

Slow Restore
The next concern is of restore speed. If you only need to restore a small amount of data then restore should be accomplished in a reasonable amount of time. But realistically, if you only need a small amount of data restored chances are that someone deleted a file or folder. You can retrieve that just as easily if not easier and faster from a local backup. So the chances of you using this service for small restores are very small.

More likely if you need to restore from an offsite location it is because your servers have failed and your onsite backup has been compromised. In this scenario you need to restore all of your data which will most likely be a very large amount of data. Here’s the bad news, each file has to be downloaded individually- which could take days to transfer back to your site.

Half a Server
Well maybe it takes two days to restore but at least you have your server back, right? Well, not exactly. What you have is the data from your server. Due to limitations in offsite replication, files and folders that are critical to your server are not backed up. Program Files, Windows files, System files among others are not selected for off site replication.

You now need to rebuild a server to put your files on, this problem is significantly increased with an Exchange and SQL server.

A Manual Compromise
The last option is portable drives. This is an attractive option because you can easily purchase inexpensive USB storage drives and remove them from the premise manually.

The drawback is that most servers and backup software do not properly recognize these devices when they are removed from the system. Once the drive is unplugged from the Once the drive is unplugged from the file server the Windows Operating System no longer registers it on the machine. When the backup job executes it will periodically and unpredictably fail.

This issue is beginning to be addressed by ejectable disk manufacturers such as IdealStor and High-Rely. But these products must also be maintained and monitored more so than tapes of the past.