Call me old school if you want, but I have been a believer in tape backups for some time.
Yes, we have replicated servers, RAID arrays, ghost images, etc. But it is hard to replace the security of a tape backup. Tucked away in a safe place it is immune from viruses, software bugs, electrical problems, etc. They just work.
Apparently, they work for Google as well. Recently, about 150,000 Google email users logged into their accounts to find all of their emails and contacts gone.
Access to that information is slowly being restored thanks to Google’s use of tape backups:
To protect your information from these unusual bugs, we also back it up to tape. Since the tapes are offline, they’re protected from such software bugs. But restoring data from them also takes longer than transferring your requests to another data center, which is why it’s taken us hours to get the email back instead of milliseconds.
I can only imagine how huge Google’s data center is where they do these tape backups.
Do you use tape backups at your operation? Why or why not?
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