Laptop tape: portable USB tape drives offer new mobile disaster recovery options - Storage Networking

Computer Technology Review, Jan, 2003 by Robert Hawkins

A new generation of portable USB tape drives offers new disaster-recovery options that can dramatically improve data security of mobile professionals. Highly skilled professionals are storing more and more data on their laptops, presenting the risk of major losses in time and information if their notebook hard drive should fail. Often these same professionals also store critical information on desktop systems that escape the normal backup process. Backing up a notebook on the road has long been a difficult task because external tape drives tend to be heavy and slow. The new USB 2.0 specification is simplifying the mobile backup task by enabling a new generation of inexpensive, lightweight and rugged drives that can perform a complete backup on a 40GB laptop drive in about two hours or a typical incremental backup in less than 30 minutes. These new tape drives make it practical for the first time to equip an organization's mobile professional's with a practical backup solution that can travel with them. If the y should drop their laptop and lose the hard drive, for example, rather than wasting a trip and losing important data, they can simply buy a new laptop, restore their data onto its hard drive, and be back in business in a couple of hours.

While many companies have invested considerable time and money in disaster-recovery solutions for data center and departmental servers, the fact is that a surprisingly high proportion of a typical company's most valuable and timely data is actually scattered around the world on its executives', sales representatives' and technical staff's laptops at any moment in time. While they travel, executives are generating documents that encapsulate critical strategic shifts; sales representatives are gathering information from customers that will be used to formulate proposals; and technical staff members are customizing products for specific applications. They are all put at risk when a tired traveler trips over the power cord of his or her laptop, sending it crashing to the ground. Often, the user loses weeks worth of work and is left without the applications and data files that they need to be productive for the rest of their trip. Many companies recommend to users that they buy a new laptop if theirs is damaged i n order to avoid the far more costly loss of productivity that occurs when a professional is forced to go without productivity tools. But in most cases a new laptop provides little immediate value because the professional will be unable to reinstall the applications they need until they return to the office. Any data that they have generated since their last backup will of course be lost forever.

Weaknesses of Previous Portable Solutions

While portable backup solutions have been available for some time, they have always left a lot to be desired. One approach is simply to install an extra hard drive in the extra bay of laptops that have them. But if the original drive is damaged or lost, the chances are that backup drive will also be unavailable. External tape backup solutions provide a much safer approach because they can be packed separately from the laptop, but portable tape drives have generally lagged behind mobile backup needs both in capacity and speed. To provide the most complete disaster recovery solution and simplify the process of restoring both applications and data, the tape drive needs to be able to store all of the information on the laptop hard drive. New drive formats such as Travan that pack larger amounts of storage capacity into smaller packages have addressed this issue. An even stickier problem has been the limited bandwidth of the available laptop ports used to connect the tape drive. The parallel ports that provided th e fastest connectivity just a few years ago were typically limited to 38,400 bits per second, too slow for mobile backup in most cases. The proliferation of USB ports in the last few years that can provide 12Mbps or 1.5MB/s or 90 megabytes per hour of data in compressed format has provided a major improvement. The recent introduction of USE 2.0 ports, that are soon as expected to become standard equipment on nearly all notebooks, solves the problem entirely.

USB 2.0--dubbed "High-Speed USB 2.0" in the marketplace by the USB Implementers Forum, Inc.--increases the speed of the peripheral-to-PC connection to 480Mbps, or 40 times faster than USB 2.0. The higher bandwidth is a major boost for such external peripherals as CD/DVD burners, scanners, cameras and hard drives. It also supports demanding PC user applications where multiple high-speed devices run simultaneously, including digital image creation and Web publishing. Microsoft Corp. has made USB 2.0 support available to OEMs and system builders, allowing PC manufacturers to ship Windows XP-based systems with the drivers loaded going out the door. In addition, USB 2.0 support to Windows XP users is now available via Windows updates, enabling higher-speed and simple connectivity to a wide range of peripheral devices from cameras to music devices to storage devices and more. One of the first laptops that were introduced with USB 2.0 was a Gateway 700XL with a Pentium 4 processor on an Intel motherboard and an NEC discrete host controller. Another earlier USB 2.0 laptop is the NEC Lavie J which also uses an NEC discrete host controller and runs Windows XP.