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What's tape backup?

Now computer users especially Server users needs larger backup capability of their backup device since their business critical data grows rapidly. When most of the computer users backup their critical data to avoid data loss, they have options to backup their data to network, removable hard disk, tape and CD/DVD.

Tape is a ribbon material with magnetic coasting to record sound, figure, number and other signals. It has large production and great popularity. Why do some people choose to backup data to tape? And what's the difference between tape backup and disk backup? This article is mainly to talk about these issues.

Relatively speaking, tape backup is an older data storage method comparing with disk backup. Disk-based data backup is much more feasible and desirable than the traditional tape backup. However, in terms of scalability of performance, reliability, security, and usability issues, disk backup is not very superior to tape backup.

Enterprise business in different scale needs different backup strategies to match their specific budget. Tape based backup solutions have been the default medium for offsite storage because of its 50 years history.

Tape backup can better ensure data security, data preservation and it's cheaper than disk backup. Everybody says that tape backup is cheap, actually it's not that cheap. It's cheap because of tape rotation. You can reuse tapes from previous backups. The most demand for tape backup comes from enterprises.

Small and medium sized enterprises usually use single drive tape, such as DAT, LTO. They can only insert one tape every time they backup, and they needs to manually change the tape. There is also autoloader such as DAT. They can insert more than one tape which is controlled by tape backup software. Users set backup task or plan and needs no manual tape alteration.

Large corporations use more tape library such as LTO DLT. Large amount of tapes can be inserted all at once.

Tape differs from disk that they won't appear in the form of partition in Windows resource manager. It only exists as Windows equipment. You can check tape device by opening Computer Management, and then go to Device Manager.

Here we recommend a backup software which supports backup to tape - EaseUS Todo Backup Server.