Preventing tape drive catastrophe - hardware

Contrary to admired belief, tape drives are in general robust and reliable. However, there are three collective mistakes that citizens make that dramatically become more intense the probability of tape drive failure.

Firstly, it is not well known that tape drives is be at variance a great deal in terms of how long they are calculated to carry out each day. Each tape drive range has a one duty cycle, which is the greatest percentage of time that the drive must be operational. For example, a drive with a duty cycle of 50% ought to be operational for no more than 12 hours a day, while a drive with a duty cycle of 100% may run continuously.

Secondly, it is not well known that data must be abounding to tape drives at a adequate rate in order to keep them streaming, or else the tape suffers from start-stop motion. It's easy to dream up the wear-and-tear this sitting room on the tape, and how the integrity of the data stored on the tape can be harshly degraded.

Thirdly, poor management and cargo space frequently causes break to tapes and the drive. It's not a good idea to drop tapes or stack them in a pyramid on the floor; the tapes ought to be handled and stored carefully. Tape drives ought to be kept as far away from contaminants as possible; for example, they shouldn't be located completely on the carpet or kept in dusty environments.

Tapes must at all times be stored in a atypical locality to the server, in order to check a adversity that compensation the head waiter from also hurtful the backups on tape. At the very least, weekly tapes be supposed to be stored offsite. To cut down the accidental of fire destruction or theft, tapes ought to be stored in a flame-retardant safe.

By subsequent these clean tips, your tape backups be supposed to run reliably, and you'll avoid the costly apply of replacing your tape drive.

Linus Chang is a encouragement knowledgeable and the lead developer of BackupAssist -- tape help software that is clean and affordable, and absolute for small and channel businesses. Guard your Windows servers, together with SQL Ma?tre d'h?tel and Argument Server, to tape, REV drive, hard drive, NAS and more, at a little bit of the cost of other backup software.