For one, the cost of the tape drive hardware is
certainly within the affordable price range for a small business
(typically $200 to $400).
Travan-based tape drives, with 10GB to 20GB of
storage space, also have ample capacity for most relatively small
office storage requirements. This means you won’t have to change
the backup tape mid-job, dramatically increasing your chances of
consistent success. Travan tape drives are also relatively reliable.
There are some critical downsides with Travan tape drives,
though.
For one, although the backup drives are
relatively inexpensive, the backup media cost of about $30 to $40 is
roughly 50 to 75 percent more expensive than comparable backup media
for DAT tape drives, which we’ll discuss in a moment.
So if you plan to implement my recommended
20-tape rotation, as well as permanent monthly archive tapes, you
need to factor in the cost of buying 32 Travan tapes at once. If
you’re thinking this sounds a lot like the penny-wise,
pound-foolish issue with inkjet printers we looked at in Chapter 2,
you’re quite right. A Travan tape drive is the relatively
inexpensive part; the Travan media are where the costs start to
soar.
Second, although Travan tape drives are much
faster than backing up to diskette or CD-RW media, Travan tape
drives still are substantially slower than DAT tape drives, which
we’ll look at momentarily. If you have a somewhat narrow window
(say between midnight and 5 a.m.) when you can take a system offline
for a full system backup, you need to consider the overall speed of
the backup and verify jobs.
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