Restore from tape with no physical windows servers

[ColeRIT]

Hi

I have an issue where we are needing the ability to restore from historic backup tapes and will soon no longer have any physical windows servers, it there any way of being able to move the Backup Exec tape drive to a PC so we could restore if we ever needed to. We will not have any need to backup using this.

Any help would be appreciated

[pkh]

You can move the tape drive to any machine provided it can support the interface card to support the tape drive, but that machine will also need to run a server-class OS to run BE 16 and higher versions of BE.  Essentially, you are back to where you started, i.e., you need a physical server for your tape drive.

[Colin_Weaver]

You should mothball the existing server that wrote to tapes, so that it can be powered back on if a restore from the old data is needed.

Your other optiion is to duplicate every set on tape to disk, BUT:

a) this would take ages to do

b) this would potentially need a lot of disk storage