Few would buy a USB stick to backup irreplaceable family photos after discovering that it would fail to restore those treasured memories 77% of the time. Yet, astonishingly,a popular backup method for UK organisations has exactly this failure rate. The culprit? Tape – a relic of the 1950s,is stilla widely used medium for backing up business critical data.Whether after 60 years it has simply become a habit, or whether staff are just unaware of how unpredictable tape really is, too many firms are risking one of their most valuable assets with an unacceptably unreliable storage format. Yet, its unreliability is just one of the pitfalls of tape.Even if your data can be successfully restored from backup tape, because they operate in a similar way to audio cassettes, it can take hours to wind through to retrieve any particular file.In addition, the portability of backup tape makes it easy to lose, susceptible to theft or easily damaged. Eoin Blacklock, Managing Director at KeepItSafe, points out that since data is such a vital and irreplaceable business asset, organisations need to wake up to the shortcomings of tape and look for alternative data backup solutions before they are caught out.KeepItSafe have come up with an infographic detailing some of the pitfalls of tape – revealing some shocking practices and illustrating some of tape’s worst data loss cases:
