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Tape Summit Predicts Tape Renaissance: Page 2 of 5

Google's recent Gmail restoration from offline tape was also brought up. This was a logical problem, where turning to offline tape that was not subject to the logical data protection problem became the solution. This illustrates an important point in data protection; that it is better to be able to restore the data, even if it takes awhile, than not to be able to restore it at all.

But how the disk-tape balance will work out for backup is not what has today's tape vendors excited. No, that excitement focuses mainly on archiving.

Archiving is the process of moving fixed content data off of active production systems. Note that the archived copy is a valid working production copy of the data. It is not a data protection copy.

Now, archiving tends to bifurcate into active archiving and deep archiving. An active archive is where the data is easily accessible online (in the sense that an end user can read it and use it for business purposes). A deep archive is usually offline where a system administrator has to retrieve the information.

The first question to ask is how much data could or should be in an archive? The answer is probably almost all of it. A rough estimate used to be that 80% of an archive is fixed content data, but that number is probably small. Much data is fixed immediately upon creation, such as sent or received e-mails or a digital medical image. Consider also that most unstructured data (which constitutes the largest growth area for most companies) is also fixed. An unfinished transaction (structured data) or a word processing document that has not been finished (semi-structured data) are not fixed content, but much data in a database or files in a server are unlikely to change. So the vast majority of most organizations' data could be put in an archive.