Why Tape Backups Are Obsolete in Today's Schools
Most schools use tape to backup their important data. Tape is a
form of magnetic media in a linear form, similar to VHS tape. It
is not very quick or inexpensive, and is not extremely reliable.
In the past though, it was just about the only form of removable
media that had the capacity to hold an entire network's data.
To keep things reliable tapes need to be alternated in a
rotation and then replaced about once per year. This costs quite
a bit of money just for the media, not to mention the extreme
prices for the drives themselves.
Tape drives are also very slow, and constantly need to be tested
and monitored to make sure that they are really backing up and
that the backups actually work. I have seen many cases with
servers going down and the tapes being corrupt.
Today, there are many different forms of removable media. If you
have purchased a hard drive or a flash memory stick in the last
few months you have probably noticed that the cost of these
devices has dropped significantly.
I recommend using external hard drives for backup. A 200GB drive
can be purchased for about $200.00. This is by far cheaper than
tape. By using a rotation of multiple external hard drives you
get a form of backup that is much faster than tape and can be
taken off-site. The backups can be checked by just browsing the
drive, similar to browsing your C: drive.
External hard drives work with most backup software, and some
drives even come with their own. Switching from a tape based
system to a drive based system normally requires very little
modification to your current system.
In summary, external drives are faster, easier to verify, and
much cheaper than tape. When it comes time to upgrade your
schools data backup system do a comparison between tape and
external hard drives. I think you will see that unless tape
drive manufacturers makes some big changes they are quickly on
their way to becoming obsolete in the school market.