White Paper:  Why Disk Backup is Better than Tape Backup

Backup for Workgroups will backup any networked Windows computer to a disk-based, centralized Data Repository.  When it comes time to reclaim a lost file, folder, or even perform a complete disaster recovery, disk-based Backup for Workgroups will give you super-fast and stress-free file restoration.

"(I am)... very impressed with the way the software works, after the initial backup of about 30GB to my Data Repository which took around 11 hours, the scheduled backup now takes less than 1 hour overnight - a process which used to take all night using tapes!   Tape drives and tapes were lasting only around 1 year, so it's win-win for me with Backup for Workgroups and I've placed my order today." 

Steve Pinch, Meggitt Petroleum Systems

Advantages of disk-based Backup for Workgroups over tape-based backup:

1. Backup for Workgroups stores the backup files on media that is on-line and readily available, so there is never any searching for backup media.

2. The Client shows you your files as you normally see them on your computer.  Tape software shows you the files you can restore based on what tape holds the files.  With Backup for Workgroups, you do not need to restore files based on where they are stored; you restore files based on how you organize the files on your computer.

3. Backup for Workgroups supports non-redundant file storage, and places all the files in a single repository, so the computer that is backed up today, has all of its unique files stored right with the files that are shared amongst other users.  Thus if you need to perform a restore, everything is already together, without any need to hunt for old media.

4. Backup for Workgroups tracks the change history of your files, so it can restore the correct list of files needed to return you computer to the exact same point as your last backup without restoring any unnecessary files.

Backup for Workgroups is a True, Disk-Based Backup Product

Backup for Workgroups is a true disk-based backup product - meaning it is "designed from the ground up to use a hard drive as its storage media."  It is not a product originally designed for tape, then retro-fitted to support backing up data to disk as a second choice.  All of your backup data is stored on a hard drive and the software itself is optimized to use the properties of hard drives when it performs a backup or restoration, which gives you the following benefits:

 Faster  - Hard drives are faster than tape drives.  Using a fast storage device reduces the backup window time, and greatly speeds up the time it takes to restore a file, a folder or a whole computer.

 Cheaper  - Hard drives are much less expensive than tapes and tape drives.

 Reliable  - Thee failure rate of hard drives is considerably lower than the failure rate of tapes.

 Convenient & Available - Using the centralized storage of a hard drive eliminates the need for managing individual backups and their respective tape media.  Quickly access and search the hard drive to restore a file in seconds.  Your data is always available.

Other backup products also use disk-based storage devices, but many of these products are only using the hard drive as a tape cache or a tape simulator.  They introduced the temporary storage of your backup data on hard disk to shorten the backup window, because tape-based backup is slow and if your data is temporarily stored on disk, you have a shorter backup window.  But you still need to move the data from the temporary storage device to tape, which introduces additional points of failure along the way.  Retrofitting tape-based backup products does not really give you the full benefits of disk-based backup offered by Backup for Workgroups, which was designed for disk-based backup from the beginning.

Faster

Hard drives transfer data at a faster rate than their tape drive counterparts.  But the ability to quickly access data at any random place on the media really gives hard drives their speedy advantage.  When you backup to disk, files can be found quickly, no matter where they are located or when they were backed up.  No searching through different tapes or waiting to advance to the middle of a tape to find a file.

The Backup for Workgroups easy-to-use interface combined with the speed of hard-disk storage allows you to quickly restore your lost data with minimal stress.

Cheaper

Fierce competition and technological improvements have driven the price of hard drives down to the point where a very large hard drive has a pretty low cost.  On average, a typical large hard drive will cost one-third the price per gigabyte of comparable tape media.

An 320 GB SATA hard drive costs about $100.  A good, name-brand tape drive can cost anywhere from $1000 to $3000 for a single tape drive, and 320 GB worth of tapes will cost you around $300, bringing the total to at least $1300.

When you use disk-based Backup for Workgroups, you eliminate the need to purchase tape drives and tape media, which are more expensive than hard drives.

More Reliable

A hard drive is a more reliable storage medium than tape, and Backup for Workgroups allows you to take fulladvantage of this reliability.  Hard drives use rigid platters to store the data, which can withstand environmental changes better than flexible media such as tapes, and do not run the risk of becoming separated, misaligned or unreadable.

Because a hard drive is more reliable, it means that the data stored on it will be there when you need to access it with Backup for Workgroups.  Restoring data from tapes can be a challenge because whether the restoration process depends upon recovering information from a single tape or a sequence of tapes, just one break in a tape can introduce uncertainty into the entire data restoration process.

Disk-based Backup for Workgroups eliminates the unreliability of tape, which allows you to have the confidence that your data will be available and intact.

Convenient & Available

Nothing is more convenient for storing large amounts of data in a single location than a hard drive. Simply attach the drive to a computer and save your backup data to it.  No matter how much data you have to backup, there is a hard drive that can handle the capacity.  Need to take a copy of your backup data for offsite storage?  Use the Backup for Workgroups Mirroring feature to mirror the data to an easily-detachable USB, Firewire, or removable hard drive.  Portable disk-based devices make it possible to carry over a terabyte of backup data offsite.

To store the same amount of data on tapes, you could end up going through 10 different tapes (100 GB each), which can become a big issue if you perform your backup in the middle of the night -  you certainly do not want to get up and change the tapes throughout the night!  You could buy a tape loader to insert the tapes for you, but that will add thousands of dollars to your backup costs.  You also never have to deal with the biggest problem of tapes:  not knowing which tape has the files you want.  Maybe they are all on one tape, maybe not.  Who knows?  And what happens if you cannot find all the tapes in a sequence?

Disk-based Backup for Workgroups will store your data in one centralized location, which makes it convenient for you to manage as well as take off-site.  The centralized location also ensures that your data is available 24/7 and a file is only a few mouse clicks away.