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Backup and Tape

 Traditionally, many huge businesses have at some point done backup directly to relatively inexpensive tape systems. For many computer applications, it's important to have data immediately ready to be restored from a secondary disk if and when the data on the primary disk becomes inaccessible. Tape backup is a good alternative when a business needs to keep records for long periods.

The term tape is often associated with Disk-to-Disk-to Tape which is also known as D2D2T, refers to backing up data on disks first and tape (or optical disk) second. Backing up onto tape is performed at less frequent intervals than from disk-to-disk.

As backup and recovery becomes more of a chief concern in the data centers, many storage managers are looking to new technologies to make the process easier.

The advantages of tape backup has kept it an acceptable method of backup for some time. As with any other technology there have been problems, whether it be the media, the drive/library or the backup window. However, backup to disk locally, replicates the backup to offsite disk, then backup to tape there. One will never have to touch the tapes as they're offsite already. In order for this to work though, you have to have something that changes the way backups are done. It simply cannot be completed with traditional backup software because there would not be enough bandwidth to replicate full and incremental backups.

In order to map ftp sites to a virtual drive you need BackupChain DriveMaker. It generates a virtual drive letter E:\ and gives access to all Windows programs to your FTP site. Files can be opened and edited directly from your favorite Windows applications.