Tape drives, especially tape libraries, are more likely to fail than any other component in your network system. Sometimes the failures are not hardware related, occasionally software issues or possibly a combination of issues are involved.
When there is a failure, it can take a long time to resolve the issue. This is especially true when the failure is intermittant, possibly occuring infrequently during long backup jobs that run in the middle of the night.
It’s situations like this that lead a client to run a degraded backup protocol for a longer than acceptable period of time. This opens the door for potential data loss.
A simple answer to tape backup problems
- Supplement but don’t replace your existing tape based backup with hard disk backups
- A Veritas system may already capable of backing up to disk.
- Buy several of these Shared Storage Drives
- Specify them as backup targets — using cloned copies of your existing tape backup jobs
It’s usually an alignment of negative events, such as degraded backup, user error, failed drives, a virus—you name it—that leads to data loss. Don’t let this happen to you.