Today, there is a strong trend in the computer industry away from backing up to tape and towards backing up to disk. There are five main reasons for this:
1. In our experience, every tape backup drive fails at some point in its life. And when it does it’s a stressful time for all diagnosing the problem, convincing the manufacturer that its faulty and putting in place an interim solution until the replacement tape drive is installed; 
 2. The ever-increasing amount of data stored on a server means the time taken to back it all up onto tape is increasing. Sometimes the “backup window” continues into the working day, slowing down network performance for everyone. This problem gets even bigger when there is more than one server or when the amount of data grows over time and it no longer fits onto one tape;
3. Swapping tape cartridges on a daily basis involves a human process, and is thus prone to forgetfulness and mistakes;
4. These days, disk drives are not only cheaper than tape drives devices, they’re also far more reliable over the long term; and
5. Restoring data from tape will always be a clumsy, tedious, slow and mistake prone process. And all at the exact point in time when there’s pressure on to get everything operational again as soon as possible.
 
In a nutshell, the backup process and the restore process is a lot faster, a lot simpler and a lot safer with disk drives than it is with tape drives.

In my next blog I'll outline what I think is today's best server backup strategy.