Get To Know Your Tapes
Due to the following issues, you should get to know what’s on your tapes:
- Retaining tapes that are out of compliance can be risky and, consequently, expensive if not addressed. How often do you come across a library of tapes from a legacy email server? Reduce the costs and risks of hanging on to those unnecessary tapes.
- Time and time again, organizations take on a newly acquired company and with it, backup tapes of which they have no prior knowledge. The former staff are long gone. The hardware and software for the tapes are way overdue for an upgrade—or gone. You want to move forward with new projects, but the tape situation bogs you down.
- Tapes degrade. The practice to rewrite critical tapes every year in order to keep them fresh is common among many storage professionals.
- Many of us in the compliance, legal, and IT industry would agree that backup tape rewriting and reuse is oftentimes a part of an organization’s data backup and recovery strategy. In fact, the first pass on a tape is usually the worst since it takes on any leftover particles from the tape manufacturing. Know which ones you can rewrite to avoid being non-compliant.
- Given that the media was properly handled and stored, backup tapes have a decent shelf life. But tapes degrade. When it is about time to expire, what data do you keep and what to discard?
It is detrimental when you lose important data on tapes that need to be retained.
Strategic Tape Discovery by Trusted Data Solutions can help mitigate the headaches and risks of dealing with legal holds, expiring backup tapes, and avoiding unnecessary license fees and upgrades. How often do you come across a library of tapes from a legacy email server? Reduce the costs and risks of hanging on to those unnecessary tapes.
TDS can identify the custodians on legal hold, restore the data, and deliver you only the data you need. This solution potentially reduces the volume of tapes you need to store and allows you to confidently be ready if the need arises for the data.
For organizations with several thousands of backup tapes, consider an ongoing approach that addresses the challenges with the tapes, but frees you from the duty of restoring the data. It’s compliant, defensible, and repeatable. Your company’s inheritance of backup tapes no longer needs to be a burden.
