Just as Backup to disk is starting to encroach onto the traditional tape backup market,the online backup market is now starting to bite at the feet of the tape vaulting services that had up until now enjoyed an easy,profitable and comfortable business model.The ever growing trend towards off site backup looks set to continue with more
and more companies opting to dispense with expensive off site physical storage and opt for the more effective online backup storage for their critical data instead.

Companies had traditionally taken the time consuming and expensive approach to storing their data off site,using the man in a van approach to send tapes daily off site to a storage facility.With the now prolific use of online data backup services offering multiple revisions of the customer data,these services offer several advantages in comparison to the traditional methods.

1.No looking for tapes in the event of a restore.
In a traditional tape based environment the tape has to be requested from storage,cataloged and then finally the data restore attempted.All of this can take hours,now compare this to the online storage services where you log onto either a local software client or web portal and pick the exact revision of the file you want with the specified time and date required and within a few minutes you have the files restored.

2.No hardware necessary to restore.
Whilst initially this may not seem like and issue,it fast becomes one when you realise that you have an issue with a particular tape unit, you now have a perfectly good tape but no hardware device to plug it into.If you do not have an identical type of tape unit on site then a costly hardware purchase will now be necessary or a warranty repair of your tape unit,either way it costs you time and money that could be far better spent on different areas of your business.

3.Tape and media based backups are unreliable
Backing up to tape or other media can be unreliable often the backup jobs appear to run fine but no data is in fact written to the media or the data that is in fact written is corrupt and useless in the event of a restore.
Tape units are troublesome to maintain and need to be serviced regularly and kept in a clean dust free environment to function efficiently.By using an off site backup service it removes these two headaches.Firstly there is no media to backup onto and secondly most online backup software CRC checksum validates every file before it backs up.Automatic notification emails let you know if there are any corruption issues with the backup that require further investigation.No more loading the restore tape only to find that its actually blank or corrupted.