Do you budget for annual tape replacement?

Technically you should be replacing your backup tapes annually but I find that many clients don’t plan for this. There are a number of reasons why you should be doing this which include the following:

Reliability. As tapes wear the likelihood of the data itself becoming corrupted increases, which will cause backup errors and could result in problem when attempting to restore. Ultimately for an extremely worn tape there is a risk that it may snap during a backup, or worse still a restore process. You need to remember that tape ultimately stretches, in fact if you think back to the days of music cassettes it is easy to reconcile this, if you remember you could record onto a cassette many times over and unless the tape actually broke it didn’t stop you actually recording, however as the tape got older you would often find that the playback sounded warbled the same problem occurs with backup.

Damage. As the tape itself becomes worn, more and more debris will be deposited on the read/write heads of the tape drive, which means more frequent cleaning will be necessary, which in turn reduces the life of the tape drive itself. In addition, as the tape wears the surface becomes rough, again causing premature wear on the heads.

Although tapes are not cheap, they are considerably less expensive than a replacement drive!

Month-end Backup. I suggest that as you buy new tapes you use the older tapes (assuming they’re not too old!) for your month end archive which I recommend you keep offsite for a period of 5-7 years. This advice is based on industry best practice which emanated from the Enron enquiry (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1780075.stm) which replaced the previously long standing concept of grandfather, father, son rotation which is wholly inadequate. The specific resulting advice was based on the fact that the enquiry needed to see the accounts data at a specific period in time, clearly if tapes are forever rotated that is impossible, it also highlighted a major flaw in most peoples backup plan in that if you are backing up your entire system on to a single tape (or tape library) and replacing the content on said tapes, then if someone deletes an important client file from your system and nobody realises for several months the data is lost, the concept of month end archive gives much better protection against this. (This same concept is the reason why most industry experts still recommend the use of tape as part of the backup plan and advise against reliance on web based backup solutions).

If you take one call to action as a result from reading this please make sure you’re buying new tapes every year without fail.

If you need help or advice with backup policy or procurement of media and drives please contact the technical advisory team at ramsac http://www.ramsac.com/