Restoring Deduplicated Data From Tape

[DavieRooker]

Hi All,

I'm just getting to grips with BE2012 and have a question about using the duplicate to tape option.

Currently we back up our data to a Deduplication drive on the Backup server, we do this for both full and incremental backups. I would like to add a stage to our backups that duplicates the full backup to tape once a month for archiving.

My question is this: if we had a major hardware failure and lost the backup server along with the Deduplication Store and Database, would the archive which is now on tape be recoverable without the original Backup server?

Apologies if this is not very clear.

Regards,

DavieRooker

[pkh]

Yes. All you need to do is to inventory and catalog the tape on another media server and you can restore from it. If the tape is encrypted then you need to know the passphrase to decrypt it before it can be used

[DavieRooker]

Thanks for the prompt reply, but just to clarify a couple of things. Will the data on the tape actually be deduplicated data? And is this a valid backup strategy to be considering?

[pkh · Accepted solution]

No. When you duplicate to tape the data is rehydrated (converted to original data) before it is written to tape Yes. This is a perfectly good strategy