What If…
Imagine for a moment that you lost all of your company’s
data – customer contact information, accounting, payroll,
and all the documents and spreadsheets and tools that you use
in your business. Imagine it’s all gone. What would that
cost you. in lost time, lost business, lost money, and lost sleep?
It would be a real disaster, wouldn’t it?
That’s not a pretty picture. That’s why you probably
store your data on a server that is backed up to tape every night.
But what you may not realize is how fragile and fallible tape
back up is. After your server hard drive has crashed – and
they all crash eventually – all that stands between you
and disaster is that one little tape. Now imagine putting that
tape in to restore your system….and it doesn’t work!
You have put all your faith and trust in that one flimsy tape,
and it has failed you!
Have you ever gone to the video store, rented a movie, sat down
on the couch, all set to watch a movie, hit play , and then the
tape won’t display a clear picture, or worse yet, your VCR
eats the tape? The very same thing can happen with your expensive
tape backup system!
Tape Backup – It's Not Enough!
You may not realize all the things that can go wrong with a tape
backup system. Here are just a few of them:
-
The person you have designated to do a daily backup, doesn’t
do it every day. You thought they were, but it hasn’t
been done for a while. This is a very common occurrence.
-
You have it scheduled to backup every night automatically.
That’s good. But is anyone checking the tape logs every
day, to make sure the backup was successful? Do they know
how to read the logs? Are you sure that everything is really
getting backed up that should be?
-
Is the tape going to be readable whenever you need it for
restore? Tape is fragile. It is magnetic media that can be
corrupted by being too close to a telephone or a computer
monitor. And think how many times you’ve seen a cassette
tape or a videotape suddenly turn into a snarled mess. The
same thing can happen to a computer backup tape when you put
it in the tape drive.
Even if none of these things happen to your backup tape, there
are other problems with tape backup. There is the problem of lost
work. Your tape is only going to restore you to last night’s
backup. Everything that has been entered into your computer system
for the past day is going to be lost. You are going to have to
go back to yesterday’s data. A whole day’s work for
each of your employees that entered information to the server
is going to be down the drain.
And then there is the time it is going to take for you to get
a computer technician on-site to work on your server. You may
have to pay a premium rate to get someone on-site after hours.
At the very least you are going to be down one day in which no
one can use your computer network. Think of the wages you’ll
be paying for people that aren’t able to do anything all
that time. Think of the extra time it’s going to take to
enter all the information into the computer when you are back
up, transcribing information from hundreds of scribbled notes.
