Back up to tape with PresSTORE is simple. The following outlines what PresSTORE Backup can offer those wanting to backup to tape. This page highlights the key benefits and offers some points for consideration.

Tape backup

• Daily short-term cyclic duplication
• Protection against hardware/building failures
• Complete machine (bare metal) recover using tapes alone
• Storing tapes off-site is generally required to achieve this
• Reliability is key
• Keep back up plans simple and easy to manage
• Backup more than one server

Considerations

• Identify your data protection needs
• How often should your data be backed up?
• Look at total data set + how much changes each day
• Manual or automated processes
• Requires manual intervention particularly with stand alone tape device
• Is an archive also required (do some files need to be stored separately for much longer periods of time?)
• Can the backup be complimented by archive (using same tape hardware) to reduce the backup set?

Off-site protection of data is important. Backup plans should reflect the need to store data off-site. This can be achieve in a number of ways but with tape, the most common practice is to run daily backup or alternating backup plans.

The daily full backup may allow the completion of a full backup and store off-site over night.

• Only viable with small data-set
• Simple to implement, especially if data-set fits on a single tape
• Lots of redundancy, a file may exist on many tapes at once
• As soon as FULL backup starts to take more time than you have, then it's not viable
• The alternating backup utilises a simple backup cycle and employs two sets of tapes. Rotate the sets of tapes on a daily basis and store one set off-site.

Features / benefits

• Protect data
• Simple set up
• Little administration
• Scalable - add or upgrade licences to offer new features, servers or workstations, larger tape libraries
• Cost effective
• Any general user can be given permission to search backup indexes and restore lost files
• Detailed PresSTORE Backup features

Licencing considerations

• Slot licences (Media Management and Storage licences) will be required if using a tape library
• Each PresSTORE Backup product includes a minimum support for one tape drive mechanism
• How many tapes can the library hold? Although not all slots need to be licenced,
• this will help determine the total number of media management licences needed to support the tape library.
• Will backup data also be held off-site?
• The number of servers to be backed dictates the number of server clients needed.
• Can the tape library be expanded and are there sufficient PresSTORE licences if early expansion is required?
• Will Archive be beneficial in addition to Backup?