Tape backup has always been the preferred method of performing offsite backups of your servers data, but in recent years new technologies have appeared that have threatened to do away with tape backup altogether.

This method of backup has always been reliant on staff to manually change the tape every morning , take it home and then remember to return it in the office the next day in case a recovery is required. Also tapes tend to be fragile, must be replaced frequently (every 6-12 months), have a high failure rate (Upto 42% of tape recoveries fail), vulnerable to theft and the data is normally not encrypted.

Nowadays more and more businesses rely heavily on their IT systems to keep their business operating in the modern digital world so it makes sense to have a reliable, secure and automated backup service that can protect a business from any disaster or event effecting the daily operation of the business.

The solution ?

Well, the best solution would be to have a combination of onsite disk backup ( and online backup (for offsite protection) thereby in the event of a problem with either your business data or the entire server you can easily and quickly recover to a normal operating state and have business continuity.

Onsite disk backup would consist of a large capacity external drive or a NAS (Network Attached Storage) disk to store local copies of your systems current state using disaster recovery software like StorageProtect external to your server. Keeping a local "image" copy means you can quickly recover from a diasaster on your server using the onsite disk.

Online backup gives you even more peace of mind that your current system state and data is held securely in a data center offsite using online backup services. The service can also keep historical copies of your data that you can go back to over a period of days or weeks.

In the event of a server crash, some services even allow you to run your entire server image in a "virtual environment" meaning on another PC or server without you even noticing anything is wrong with your production server, allowing you to operate normally until the fault with the production server is sorted. You can also have the facility of running your production server in an online "virtual cloud" which means operating your server image directly online !

Can you honestly say you have confidence in your current backup solution ?