Modern Data Protection

Chapter 12. Data Protection Targets

There are more data protection targets (i.e., devices to which you will send backups or archives) now than at any other time in the data protection industry. When I started as the “backup guy” at MBNA so many years ago, there was one choice: tape drives. The only question was which tape drive you would use, and since many server vendors shipped servers with pre-installed tape drives, even that wasn’t a question most of the time. HP servers came with 4 mm DDS drives (2, 8, or 24 GB capacity), digital servers came with TK50s (94 MB!), and AT&T 3B2s came with QIC-80 tape drives that held 80 MB of data and were not quick. We also used 9-track tape drives for the mainframes. If you don’t know what those are, they’re the big reel-to-reel tape drives you see in every old computer movie.

Those tasked with backing up data today have so many other choices and decisions to make. These decisions often come with misinformation about the various choices. My hope in this chapter is to give you unbiased information about the choices before you, so that you can make an educated decision of your own.

Tape Drives

Tape drives are the oldest data protection device still in use in production environments today. Yes, there were punch cards and even paper tape, but magnetic tape drives were really the first device to catch on as a mechanism for backing up programs and data stored on servers. I remember backing up my TRS-80 to a cassette tape. Boy, that was a long ...