Tape backup and recovery

When to use tape backup and recovery

You use tape backup and recovery to create tape archives or retrieve data from tape archives. Tape archives complement online backup methods, and you should plan to do tape backups regardless of the online backup and recovery methods you use.

Advantages of tape archives

Making tape archives gives you the following advantages over relying solely on online storage:

Once made, they require few resources to maintain.
You can put the archives in a more secure place than you can put a filer.
You can recover data on Sun Solaris systems with the ufsrestore command.
Data archived on tape is on a physically stable medium and is stored in a standard format. You can recover data from any release of Data ONTAP.

Disadvantages of tape archives

Tape archives have the following disadvantages compared to online storage:

It takes a long time to restore data from tape.
It is time-consuming to find a particular file or directory on tape.
Some systems are too large to be backed up to tape efficiently.
Large file systems might need to be broken into multiple volumes and backed up on different nights. Volumes over 500 GB or total data set sizes greater than 1.4 TB can take a long time to restore. These volumes are good candidates for backup using the SnapMirror® or SnapVault^TM features.

Where to find backup and restore information

If you want to perform backups to tape and restores from tape, you should be familiar with the topics listed in the following table.

Topic	Chapter
Understanding tapes and controlling tape drives	Chapter 2, Tape Drive Management
Backing up data to tape	Chapter 3, Data Backup to Tape
Restoring data from tape	Chapter 4, Data Restoration from Tape
Using the NDMP protocol, which third-party backup software vendors use	Chapter 5, Using NDMP Services