Mind Your Tapes

Most businesses still rely on the venerable tape drive and tape media for backup and archiving, but what is your strategy for those tapes when not in the drive?  Bare minimum is to rotate tapes offsite to prevent a building fire or other disaster from wiping out all your data.  Some people will take them to their personal residence, but there are also storage services that will pickup and drop-off tapes according to a set schedule and even securely store multiple copies – perhaps monthly and yearly archives, for a fee.

Some popular rotation techniques:

Grandfather, father, son

Tower of Hanoi

Also remember to test your backup by doing a full restore periodically – the tapes are not going to do you any good in an emergency if the data is not there as expected.