Local Backups

Local backup is designed for people who want a simple backup strategy with minimal recurring costs. Backups are written using a tape drive attached to your workstation. If you do not have a tape drive, but have access to one on another machine, the backups could possibly be done across the network. As part of the system administration contract, backup scripts are customized for your system and set up to run automatically at the same time each night. However, someone at the site of the workstation is responsible for removing the previous night's tape and inserting another tape; a reminder message can be automatically sent via email to the person responsible for changing tapes. If the tape is not changed, then the new backup overwrites the previous backup.

There is no additional contract cost for the local backup option. However, the owner of the workstation bears the cost of a local tape drive and tapes.

If requested, local backups can be written to a spare disk rather than to tape. Disk backups have the advantage of speed, convenience, and cost effectiveness (disks tend to be cheaper than tape drives, and you do not have to buy tape media). However, with disk backups, you have only one backup copy of your data; for example, if you accidentally delete a file, it exists on the backup disk only until the next backup runs.

Advantages

• It provides the least expensive backup available.
• Since backup tapes are local and self-contained, restores from local backups are faster than from ADSM (network) backups.
• You have the flexibility to decide how many backups to retain, the frequency of backups, the type of tape drive to use, etc.

Disadvantanges

• If the tape capacity is less than the amount of data you want to back up, then the only options are either to have someone local change tapes midway through the backup, or to backup only part of your data each night.