The advantages of using tape to store long-term archival and compliance data
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include low cost per gigabyte and relative ease of transportability, assuming the tapes do not get lost in transit. Several options exist to secure stored data, including drive or tape library level encryption.
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Periodically audit your backups and archives by randomly selecting a tape and verifying that you can read the tape on a tape drive in a different location than where it was written. Also, you should verify that you can restore selected data to an alternative location. This audit confirms that what you think has been backed up is in fact on the tape. If your data is important enough to backup, then it should be important enough to make multiple copies that can be stored in different locations either online, near line or offline.
Protect your tapes and the data they store by implementing appropriate levels of physical and logical security. Store your tapes in a comfortable place, free of dust and other containments. As an added safeguard, store your tapes away from any sources of magnetic interference including monitors, motors and microwave ovens. Also, keep your tape drive heads clean, as recommended by the drive manufacturer -- using the recommended cleaning tools.
Manufactures of tape drives and media including HP, IBM, Imation, Quantum, Sony and Sun/STK among others have specific recommendations for the care and handling of media for you to review. In general, if you are not comfortable with the habitat in which the tapes are stored, chances are the tapes are not comfortable either. If you need to move tapes from a climate controlled environment, allow time for the tape to acclimate and adjust to the new surroundings before using the tape.
Determine what the lifecycle of the media that you are using is and at what point in time you will retire a cartridge or migrate to a different storage medium. Unless you plan on being in the media conversion business or maintaining an active tape technology museum, avoid islands of technology to preserve backwards compatibility, and instead look into migrating data to alternate mediums for preservation where practical. Once you have migrated or retired old tape media, make sure to dispose of it properly (by yourself or with a qualified disposal firm). Simply throwing your old tapes in the dumpster is no longer an option.
Tape remains an option for various environments depending upon your preferences, budget and requirements. Look to the future as to what technology you will eventually replace tape with. Also, consider when and how you will go about migrating data from one medium to another. In the meantime, take care of your tapes so that your data will be safe and secure when you need to access it.
Do you know…
How to perform effective data backups?
The important differences between archives and backups?
This was first published in August 2006
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