If you are looking for the right software to ease your backup pain, look no further. |
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Contents 
BrightStor Arcserve
Legato Networker
Tivoli Storage Manager
Veritas Backup Exec
Specifications
How we tested
Checklist
Editor's choice
About RMIT |
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For this reason, support of large and fast disk arrays as backup devices is almost a given in most backup software. Hard drives are dirt cheap and far faster than tape. A typical scenario has the backup initially written to disk and then, when convenient, farmed off to tape.
There are various scenarios that may be used to trigger the transfer to tape:
- The drive array may simply be a staging point to capture the backup data in a short period of time and then for the remainder of the day the data is more slowly transferred to tape.
- High water mark -- when the backup drive arrays free space reaches a certain size, say 25 percent, this may trigger the transfer to tape until the free space drops back to a pre-set size.
- Data aging -- as soon as data on the disk becomes a particular age the data in question is transferred from disk to tape.
- The disk array may simply be the primary on-site backup with the tape copy transported to an off-site vault in case a local catastrophe takes out the primary backup drive array. By using the disk as the primary backup, if you do need to restore data it will be far quicker retrieving the data from disk than tape.
But tape still has its place. While it may appear that for the most part we are dismissing tape as a waning technology, tape storage still has some definite advantages over disks. For example, storage capacity is generally higher, the media is interchangeable, tapes have a very long shelf life, and are virus free -- drive arrays can be gazumped by viruses but your archived tapes are quite safe.
Although the test scenario for our comparison is quite modest most of the software tested quite happily scales up to large enterprise infrastructures. In a large organisation many of the features in our "Quick Checklist" become critical and can save an organisation a great deal in time and money, just centrally managing multiple servers, backup devices, and geographic locations from a single location is a boon.
