A Recommended Tape Backup Procedure

Your tape drive isn’t a backup device. It’s a recovery unit! The following procedures maximize the opportunity to recover data.
A. Start with 12 tapes and label them as follows:
1) Monday	2) Tuesday	3) Wednesday	4) Thursday
5) Week One	6) Week Two	7) Week Three	8) Week Four
9) Week Five	10) Spare One	11) Spare Two	12) Spare Three
Tape use is simple: B. Use each of the first four tapes on the respective days of the week: Monday through Thursday. Each morning, the previous day’s tape should be removed from the drive unit and placed in a fireproof safe or taken off the premises by a company owner or member of management. This step must be followed. If the tape is lost or destroyed in a fire or storm, data is also lost, even if all other procedures are perfect. If your physical plant is destroyed, retention of vital data such as Accounts Receivable, Orders, Estimates, Inventory and the like could mean the difference between remaining in business or not. Even when a company’s computers are lost in a physical disaster, data from a tape can be restored to replacements. Activities such as receivables collection and filing insurance claims can begin quickly. Such tasks will take far longer or may be impossible if data has to be reconstructed or can’t be recovered.
C. Use each of the five weekly tapes on the respective Friday of the month: 1st, 2nd, etc. Not all months have five weeks, so you won’t use all five every month. On the following working day, each Friday’s tape should be stored or taken off premises just like any other tape.
D. At the end of the first quarter of the physical or your fiscal year, use the #1 (Monday) tape to backup, no matter the day of the week the quarter end falls on. Label the container for the tape as Q1, 19XX and label the tape itself with the date of the backup. Replace it with a brand new tape labeled "#1 Monday." At the end of the second quarter, do the same with the #2 (Tuesday) tape and so on. These quarterly data collections should be archived off-premises (as in a company safe-deposit box) and retained indefinitely. In this manner, the four most heavily used tapes are replaced annually. Replace all "weekly" tapes every two to three years on the same anniversary (such as he end of the fourth quarter).
E. Use a "Spare" tape any time the scheduled cartridge is not available, and put it into the regular rotation. If you have to use "Spare One" on a Wednesday, for example, don’t record on the cartridge again during that week. Ex. 1: Replace the spare with the original tape when it again becomes available. If it doesn’t, obtain a replacement tape. Ex. 2: If the original again becomes available, it should be put back into rotation and the "Spare" returned to spare status. If the original tape can no longer be used, relabel the "Spare" and use it in daily rotation. Label and use a new tape as the spare.
Here’s what this procedure archives: 1. A weeks worth of data is constantly available on tape, along with a month’s worth of backups at weekly intervals If, as sometimes happens, you find that a file needs restoration or rolling back to an earlier version, you have several data sets to select from. 2. Tape cartridges are replaced routinely, rather than waiting until a tape ages to the point that the data it contains may not be readable