Data archiving is an ideal solution for any company that needs to keep data for an extended or indefinite period of time. It’s also great for businesses that must comply with data privacy laws. This information must be safeguarded from cyber-attacks, natural calamities, and human mistake.
Data Archiving on Tape and Disk
Despite its long history, tape is still useful in some situations, and is still commonly used as a backup and archiving solution at many Fortune 500 firms today.
The reading process is maintained completely distinct from the primary storage medium, making tape a very simple storage medium. This lowers the risk of data loss over time, making it a great choice for long-term backup and archive storage.
Backup tapes also support “Write Once, Read Many” (WORM) data encryption, which helps to avoid data manipulation and is a must for storing and accessing sensitive information kept for legal or compliance purposes. Tape is also utilised to offer physical storage that is “air-gapped” from production systems as a security barrier.
Hard drives, on the other hand, are far faster than tape and are better suited to scenarios when quick disaster recovery is required. They are more mechanically difficult than tape and have a larger chance of breaking over time.
Because of the trade-offs between speed and long-term durability, many businesses will utilise tape for long-term data storage offsite and hard drives for local backups or at secondary failover facilities where quick recovery is essential.
Cloud Data Archiving
While tape has been used for archival storage for many years, it has a number of drawbacks:
- Tape will deteriorate physically over time, posing a risk of data loss.
- Data recovery is challenging since you have to sift through a huge number of tapes to discover what you need.
- Tape archives necessitate the purchase of expensive hardware and software. Tape archives require a lot of time and effort.
Cloud archiving solves all of the issues that traditional tape-based archives have, and it does it in a time-saving, convenient, and cost-effective manner. Many important advantages over tape and disc are provided by innovations in the supply of cloud-based backup and disaster recovery solutions, such as:
- Cloud computing does not necessitate large hardware investments.
- It’s straightforward and quick to recover deleted data using cloud archival storage.
Cloud-based archiving solutions make data search and retrieval more efficient, allowing IT to promptly respond to recovery requests. - For varying retention and air-gaps requirements, cloud archiving can provide a mix of short-term and long-term archiving using a hybrid of disc and tape solutions.
- Without client intervention, cloud archiving rotates disc and media-based archives, ensuring that archives never become obsolete or inaccessible, as many old on-premise systems do.