Why do we need to do tape backups?

Why backup?

Tape drives are an important valuable tool for backing up and storing critical data offsite. As the media tapes are removable any data that is backed up can be stored for safe keeping in the event of data loss. Increasingly legislation is dictating that all data is stored for Data Compliance. By using LTO-3 technology your cost per GB of backing up critical information is 10.5p, this is the cheapest way of storing critical data.

 Companies experience data loss in a variety of ways:
 Power outage When power is restored disk drives refuse to spin up or corrupt disk cache information written.
 Earthquake Shock damage disk drives fail to spin up
 Fire Smoke damage or meltdown
 Flood Water damages sensitive electronics
 RAID failure RAID fails and no hot online spare
 Power surge Blows circuits
 Wear Tape drives wear out and bearings fail
 Software Software fails to start or finish backup
 Virus Viruses re-format hard disks
 Malicious Damage Employees deletes data or someone hacks the computer
 Theft Computer systems are stolen
 Accidental erasure Employee accidentally deletes the wrong file or directory
 Terrorist threat Bombs blowing up buildings

Data loss can be very costly not only in dollars and downtime but also in productivity.

   93% of companies that lost their data center for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster. 50% of businesses that found themselves without data management for this same time period filed for bankruptcy immediately. (Source: National Archives & Records Administration in Washington.)
   File corruption and data loss are becoming much more common, although loss of productivity continues to be the major cost associated with a virus disaster. (Source: 7th Annual ICSA Lab's Virus Prevalence Survey, March 2002.)
   The average company spends between $100,000 and $1,000,000 in total ramifications per year for desktop-oriented disasters (both hard and soft costs.) (Source: 7th Annual ICSA Lab's Virus Prevalence Survey, March 2002.)
   In addition to being more prevalent, computer viruses were more costly, more destructive, and caused more real damage to data and systems than in the past. (Source: 7th Annual ICSA Lab's Virus Prevalence Survey, March 2002.)
   Of those companies participating in the 2001 Cost of Downtime Survey: 46% said each hour of downtime would cost their companies up to $50k, 28% said each hour would cost between $51K and $250K, 18% said each hour would cost between $251K and $1 million, 8% said it would cost their companies more than $1million per hour. (Source: 2001 Cost of Downtime Survey Results, 2001.)
   At what point is the survival of your company at risk? 40% said 72 hours, 21% said 48 hours, 15% said 24 hours, 8% said 8 hours, 9% said 4 hours, 3% said 1 hour, 4% said within the hour. (Source: 2001 Cost of Downtime Survey Results, 2001.)

Conclusion
A reliable tape backup system that centralises all data to a tape library or autoloader will greatly enhance an organisations chances of finding the data, reducing the cost of multiple copies of backup software, reduce maintenance costs and servers will be more reliable as they do not have individual tape drives installed!