Considerations before choosing a tape backup method

You must consider your business requirements before choosing a tape backup method. Data ONTAP supports dump backup and SMTape backup methods.

You should use dump backup and restore if you want the following features:

A backup and recovery solution that helps you perform the following tasks:
- Perform Direct Access Recovery (DAR) of files and directories.
- Back up some, but not all, subdirectories or files in a specific path.
- Exclude specific files and directories during a backup.
Preserve your backups for several years.

You should use SMTape backup and restore if you want the following features:

A disaster recovery solution that provides high performance.
To use tape backup to perform an initial full-volume transfer of a source SnapMirror volume to a remote destination storage system and then perform incremental transfers over the network.
In such cases, you can perform an SMTape backup of the SnapMirror volume to a tape, ship the tape to the remote location and restore the contents to a target volume, and set up a SnapMirror relationship. After the SnapMirror relationship is established, the incremental backups are performed over the network. You can also use this method to establish a SnapMirror relationship between source and destination storage systems over a low-bandwidth connection.
To preserve the deduplication on the backed up data during the restore operation.
To back up large volumes.
If you use the dump engine to back up volumes with a large number of small files, your backup performance might be affected. This is because, the dump engine performs a file system level backup and has to traverse through the files and directories to back up the volumes. These volumes can be more efficiently backed up to tape by using SMTape.