I work with small legal practices (2-10 people). The principals of these firms have money to spend, but they are still concerned about managing costs. Recently, one of my clients attended a conference where someone made a presentation about back office technology for legal practices. The presenter dismissed Travan tape technology as unreliable and strongly recommended external/removable hard drives for backups.
Depending upon your backup needs and your risk profile, there are certainly situations where the hard drive backup may be the best solution. However, it seems to me that if you want/need say a 6-media rotation (Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri/Week1, Week 2), then the removable hard drive is impractical and where imho a tape-based solution is the most practical.
The comments about Travan reliability aren't consistent with my personal experience and are not consistent with the fact that there are something like 14 million drives and 200 million tapes in circulation.
This question is focussed specifically on Travan technology, its reliability, and its suitability for small back office backups. Is it a good, dependable solution or should it be dimissed in light of better, equivalent cost technology? While anecdotes are interesting, I am more interested in authoritative accounts for or against this technology and points will be awarded accordingly. Please do not quote vendor literature unless it cites a less-biased source.
Travan can be reliable in a sense that we all know in the computer world there are some things that just go bad faster than others for no apparent reason. So there are going to be some bad tapes at some point in the life cycle of using them. If you maintain the drive, make sure the settings in the backup software verify the data on the tapes, and you place the tapes in an area that is not too hot/cold/muggy or near somthing that will destroy them (magent) then you should be fine. I have setup several clients with Travan tapes. Only a few picked DAT (due to high price). But the ones that did use Travan worked great. I had 1 client that had a few issues with the tapes but that was due to lack of running a cleaning job and using a tape drive cleaner which eventually was the problem with the tapes going bad. So I would say Travan is fine IF you clean the drive as recommended. Also the tapes we had were lifetime warranty so the bad got sent back while the good were still being used in rotation and the backups were not interupted. (You obviously want more than 1 tape) I'd recommended to have 1 tape per day and 1 backup tape in case somthing happens to 1 of the others. The backups ended up working great. They bought Veritas's $400 software (Backup Exec i forget what ver) and used it every now and then because people would accidently delete needed files. I think they work fine, even though I love the new Server 2003 shadow copy technology much better with a raid system to backup the data ;)