My answer to the question whether one should change a classic tape library into a virtual tape library is nearly the same as for the question regarding the use of VTLs instead of backup to disk or deduplication storages. Because we have the same issue here: VTLs are, oversimplified, just file servers. So they have […]
In this days it is hip to store all kinds of data in the cloud, thus on a storage reachable over the internet and housed in a more or less huge data center. This trend is also seen in terms of data protection. The idea behind this is to store the data that was previously
Given the question, whether backup should be done to disk or to tape, my answer is always the same: both. Each of these storage types has its benefits and its disadvantages and only when they are combined, you can tap the full potential of them. As explained in my post Hardware – Tapes the essential
Backup serves the need to prevent data loss by various reasons: environmental outages, logical failures, human errors or even sabotage. In contrast to this, archiving is the attempt to store data for long time periods, in many cases for legal purposes. In addition to this, most archiving solutions provide fast search indexes in order to
Today I want to explain the different backup methods and their (dis-)advantages a bit more in detail. But let’s start with some background information: The Archive Bit The archive bit is a file attribute used in Microsoft Windows to flag newly created and changed files. This attribute can be interpreted (and changed) by backup products.
Some hardware vendors offer so-called virtual tape libraries (VTL) in their portfolio. A VTL is a server, usually run with a proprietary operating system. Those servers offer a defined amount of internal storage that they present over the network. They do this by simulating a tape library to the backup server. Most of the machines
In parallel to the file-based backup we produce with Backup Exec, there are software products that create images (snapshots) of whole volumes to back up he data contained. These images are usually stored locally on a disk oft he imaged server but can also be transported over the network or coped to removable devices. Hint:
As I wrote in Chapter 0, my personal opinion on why we do backups is, because we want (and have) to be able to do restores. In other words: Define, which data you need to restore in which amount of time. When you did this in detail, it’s quite easy to define, how your backups
How much space do you need to provide for backup purposes? Of course, my answer is again: it depends. There are some questions to be answered before you can make an educated guess about this number. And sorry, it won’t be more than a guess. Fist of all, we need the amount of data to