Are you one of the last holdouts? 8-9% of all IT teams are still using tape backup as primary storage.

According to Gartner, 9% of all enterprises are still storing their data directly to tape backup.    The Unitrends 2018 DR survey results (a survey of over 800 IT administrators) gave us a similar number   –  8% – so it couldn’t be a coincidence.    A statistically significant portion of IT teams really are still backing up directly to tape storage.  We aren’t talking about those companies who use tape for long-term archiving (that number is closer to 13% and still pretty archaic). We are talking about IT teams whose primary back up technology is  tape.

One reason this is so mind-boggling is the amount of time and effort typically required to perform routine file recoveries from tape.  Unitrends customers are able to recover any file (from login to full recovery) in well under 5 minutes, allowing them to keep the interruption to their work to a minimum. Unitrends disk and cloud solutions are fast, our UI is snappy, and Instant Recovery is, well, instant. 

Customers using tape as their primary backup target are not so lucky.  First, if the correct tape has been sent offsite, it has to be recovered from its remote physical location. This can take up to 24 hours depending on the tape storage vendor. Then the IT admin (or automated library) has to mount that tape in the reader and find the location of the desired file.  Tapes are linear, meaning the machine has to scroll through the entire data folder to recover just a single file. The process that Unitrends customers can do in minutes can take a tape user hours. 

Here is what Al Halloway of The Air Zoo had to say about recovering files with Unitrends after transitioning off of a backup to tape solution:

“It was amazing how much relief I experienced.” Al Hollaway said.  “I have been pleased with the ability to recover individual files quickly and easily, which was something that was difficult with the old tape system,” he said. “Unitrends’ system is so far advanced over the old tapes that we are now far more secure.”

Are you still using tape for primary backup?  You can still preserve your tape archives if that is your motivation but by adding disk-based backup and disaster recovery you can gain incredibly fast RTOs and RPOs, especially when compared to the times for recovery using tape.

Consider reading the Whitepaper “Top 3 Reasons IT Teams Are Still Using Tape for Their Primary Backup Target and are they still true.   We’d be glad to lend a hand.

 

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