Clean up Tape Backup

A Backup Article Contributed by Melissa Larose

Clean up Tape Backup

Tape backup can help you squeeze as much as possible out of that operations budget. Tuning your tape backup system and process can help keep your company in line with the fast pace of business. Any time you can rework a process to hold more in less time and with less money it is a great move. Cleaning closets in the spring and winter, the garage at the beginning of the summer, and drawers whenever you can't identify what the drawer is holding is no different than cleaning up the tape storage and identifying processes that can be reworked for greater efficiency.

Change the Shape of Tape Backup

In order to get a clear picture of your tape backup system you need to understand the data needs of your company. This process should take place for a number of reasons, not the least of which is disaster recovery. But for the purpose of keeping your tape backup in tip top order you need to review data needs.

Things change and when they do they may alter the needs to the data or they may enlarge the needs of the data. If you aren't aware of the change then you won't be aware of what you need to do to keep up with the change. Your goal is to remove the unneeded tapes and make room for the new.

Tape Backup Data Review

One of the first things you can do is identify all the data on your network. Break it into groups of critical, archived, user/personal, sensitive....you get the idea. The data you want to remove from the process is the archived data. You may also want to evaluate the user/personal data such as email archives, etc. and put a size limit on that data.

Some people still hang on to their email like it was gold not understanding that once a reply process has begun with a particular email (and the settings are set to copy the original when replying)the whole of the conversation is contained in the final email. What a waste of time this can be to backup.

Once you have identified the archived data, and you have the authorization to do so, backup this archived data and put it on tape. Makes sure it is recoverable and then remove it from the network. There is really no need to backup up archived data when there have been no changes since the last time you ran a backup, is there?

The idea is to be more efficient with your tape backup process. The less data there is to backup the faster the process happens and the more time your IT team has to focus on other projects.

Tape Backup Trudges On

The backup process will never disappear from the face of business because the data is big business. The value of data decreases as it ages so doesn't it make sense to store the less valuable data on a cost effective backup media like tape?