Most businesses back up their data to tapes. However, the current trend is to move backups to hard drives instead. This new method has become popular because of the introduction and low price of external USB hard drives. Drive-to-Drive backup may be as simple as copying the contents of one drive to another. However, companies can still enjoy the same flexibility, reliability and automation that backup software offers by using the software to back up to drive instead of tape.

Backup to hard drives can offer significantly reduced backup times to promote a more available system. Even more important, it's a much more convenient way to retrieve files from the backup. Loading a tape to search for a single file to restore could take as long as an hour to setup the restore job, load the tape, find the file and to restore it. By comparison, that same restore operation could take a matter of minutes with a drive-based backup because the seek times to find that individual file are much faster on drive than on tape. Moreover, when catastrophe strikes and a company needs to restore an entire server, a drive restore is much quicker than a tape.

Drive-To-Drive – Key Benefits

• Speed
Hard drives are capable of backing up data at sustained transfer rates of 50MB per second whereas the fastest tape drives today perform at transfer rates of 20MB per second using streaming. The big difference is that drives do not need to be streamed, making it wonderful for typically slow backups like incremental backups, transaction log backups and backups of clients on slow networks. In addition since the access time is in milliseconds for hard drives as compared to minutes in a tape drive, restores are faster.

• Reliability
Tape drives require much more maintenance than hard drives. The headaches of jammed tapes or cleaning tapes disappear. According to one of the largest tape library manufacturers, tape drives mounted in a tape library have an annual failure rate of 60%. Current hard drive technology averages an annual failure rate of less than 0.8%. Also, the shelf life of a hard drive is much longer than a tape drive.

Other Benefits of Disk-To-Disk

Fast restoration can be crucial for mission critical data

Users are less likely to know for sure whether a backup has successfully completed with tape

Drive prices have fallen

Cheaper backup strategy (media costs reduced)

Independent Redundant units (better than one expensive tape drive)

Hardware failure does not stop entire backup plan

Less complicated recovery (in times of stress)

From single drive internal and external units to multi-drive rack and tower models, consider Highly Reliable Systems. Capacity ranges from 80GB to an impressive 3.5 Terabytes total storage (uncompressed) in the 7 bay Rack-Mount model using their 500GB HR media!

For information about increasing the speed, capacity, or reliability of your backups call us at 212-953-0400