In my last column I discussed some of the limitations of cloud-based backup and why more cloud providers should provide some form of external, portable storage to overcome those challenges. I used tape technology as an example. The second and potentially larger problem with tapeless cloud backup is the recovery process. Vendors’ claims about the lack of tape value are getting out of hand.
If you lose an entire server, the data deduplication that helps you in backup is not going to save you from an extended period of downtime while this data trickles through the Internet. There is no baseline to compare it to and, even if there was, most software solutions can’t do a deduplicated recovery.
In almost every case, having the provider create a tape and overnight it to you would be faster. Incidentally, if they gave you the ability to create your own local tape as I described in my last column, you could go get the data yourself from your own storage. Basically, you could have a backup to your backup. In a disaster that is a good thing.