It's Time To Break Up With Your Old Tape and USB Drives

They say breaking up is hard to do; but when it comes to choosing between your old familiar tape or USB drive and risking your company's data, it should be a no-brainer. Tape drives are notorious for failure — and if you are still swapping out tapes as your only backup source, here are 4 reasons you need to break it off: 

1. Your tape drive is a cheater. Here you are, faithfully swapping tapes or drives and taking them home every day (at least you do most of the time), feeling secure that your data is safe and that you could be back up and running again fast in the event of a disaster, right? Wrong.  Your tape drive only backs up your data—the information you have physically typed in; but your software programs, network settings, printer and Internet configurations are NOT getting backed up and cannot be recovered from the tape. That means if your server were to go up in flames (or simply fails) you would have to find all your software disks and authentication codes and REBUILD your server. That task could take several days, costing you a lot of money and lost time. 
2. You could lose an entire day's worth of work. Ever lose an hour’s worth of work or a document because Word crashed? Now imagine losing an ENTIRE DAY’S worth of work. Frustrating, huh? Since tape drives can’t perform open file OR continuous backups, if your system crashes at the end of the day, all the documents, entries and work you (and your entire staff) completed that day are toast. And if Murphy's Law applies, that would be the day you hammered through a grueling 30-page report.  Newer virtual backup systems will take a snapshot of your server every 30 minutes, saving your work from going into Never-Neverland. Plus, if you leave files open at night when you leave for the day (and we all do that occasionally), it will back up those files too.
3. Your tape drive will abandon you when you need it most. You can only retrieve the data from your tape with a compatible tape drive. If you have had your tape drive more than 2 years, it may be a phased out model, no longer available to order. This could mean that when you need to recover your data, you are unable to, even if the data is there.  
4. You can’t trust a tape drive. Tapes have an average failure rate of 100%—they all fail, it's just a matter of when, not if. Plus, you have to remember to swap out tapes every day, which leaves room for human error.

The bottom line is this: Tape and USB drives are antiquated, and they're an incredibly unpredictable way of backing up your company’s data. That’s why we urge all our clients to "break up" with their old tape and USB drives and upgrade to a business-grade HaonTech Cloud Backup solution. 

This article previously appeared on HaonTech.com