Suppose for a moment that a virus has infected your entire computer
network. It has quickly spread through every employee's workstation,
into every document and database file. All your work, all your data -
it's all destroyed. How would your business recover?

Without an adequate backup and recovery plan, every business is at risk.
Because companies rely on data and mission-critical applications, the
cost of downtime is exorbitant, potentially exceeding thousands of
dollars per hour for such expenses as recovering data and system files
and replacing equipment - not to mention the loss in productivity as
well as customers. According to a recent study, nearly half of the
companies that are unable to fully restore their data after a disaster
will go out of business entirely.

Most small to medium business (SMB) customers look for five things when
evaluating backup technologies:

• More capacity

• More speed

• More affordability

• More reliability

• Less hassle in the backup process

Why tape is ideal for backup

Whether backing up an individual workstation or a small network, tape is
an ideal storage medium because it is capable of storing high capacities
of information at relatively low costs. Tape is the superior choice for
disaster readiness because it is easily stored off-site, and its long,
extremely stable shelf life meets archival requirements and data
retention objectives that may be federally or state-mandated.

When developing a tape backup strategy, one of the considerations is the
volume of data to back up. Environments with 20-800 gigabytes should
consider the VXA format; for larger operations with 200-2000 GB or more,
LTOT (UltriumT) technology is ideal.

Other factors to establish include the frequency of backup operations,
archival goals, and tape lifecycles. From this costs can be estimated
for budgeting purposes and procedures can be developed to implement the
backup process.

A full backup captures all data files, system files and applications.
Once the total capacity is determined, it's a simple matter to divide
that number by the total capacity of each cartridge. For example, if a
system's total capacity is 400 gigabytes and each VXA tape cartridge
holds 86 gigabytes, five tapes will be needed for a full backup.

Most tape drives and software applications compress data to reduce the
size of the files, thus reducing the total number of tapes needed.
Assume the backup will be compressed by a rate of 2:1, depending on the
nature of the data and the drive and media performance. With this rate
of compression, only two and a half tapes are required for the full
backup.

A partial backup (incremental or differential) only copies data that is
new or changed since the last full backup. This capacity requirement
will vary depending on how quickly data changes, but is typically much
smaller, often as much as 100 times smaller, than that of a full system
backup.

The best, most economical tape backup strategy for SMBs is a combination
of full and partial backups using the backup software's tape-append
option. This will allow the writing of additional data to tape where the
previous backup session left off, reducing the number of tapes needed.
For even more economy, some tape formats, such as VXA, can be purchased
in multiple lengths providing various data capacities depending on the
individual requirements.

Tape rotation, archiving,