What the experts say:
Storage Magazine (storagemagazine.techtarget.com) surveyed its readers . . . to determine how often unreliable tapes were at the heart of a backup snafu. When asked to describe the tape failure situation in their shops, nearly a third of the respondents (31.2%) said it was either a significant problem that often disrupts backups or a problem that sometimes disrupts backups.”
According to Microsoft, 42% of attempted recoveries from tape backups in the past year have failed. In addition, Ben Matheson, group product manager for Microsoft Data Protection Manager, told me, "More than 50 percent of customers we've surveyed said their current backup solutions do not fill their needs."
"Restoring from tape fails 50% of the time in distributed organizations and mid-sized companies." – Baroudi Bloor (http://www.hurwitz.com/?source=Data-Mountain.com) (now Hurwitz and Associates)
"Over 34% of companies do not test their backups and of those that tested, 77% found their tape backups failed to restore." – Storage Magazine (storagemagazine.techtarget.com)
A survey by the Yankee Group and Sunbelt Software found that 40% of IT managers had been unable to recover data from a tape when they needed it.
According to The Gartner Group (http://www.gartner.com/), 71% of all tape restores fail. Strategic Research (http://www.sresearch.com/?source=Data-Mountain.com) claims 54%.
“It is estimated that 60% of companies that lose their data shut down within 6 months.” – John Jackson, Storage Insider
Data Restoration Tranfer Rates*
|
Tape Backup |
Up to 1.5 GB/hr |
|
Online Backup |
T1 |
Up to .51 GB/hr |
|
T3 |
Up to 12.24 GB/hr |
|
CareSAFE |
Up to 1000 GB/hr** |
* An industry standard overhead of 20% was used to calculate the most accurate data transfer figures.
** Must have a gigabit backbone in order to achieve 1000 GB/hour.