BackupEDGE 3.x Tape Drive Support- Fast File Restore

Medium: Tape Drives

Tape drives (except very old legacy devices) provide a high-speed positioning mechanism to greatly reduce the time needed to restore a few files from tape using a technology called Quick File Access (QFA). BackupEDGE includes full support for this on all platforms and calls it Fast File Restore™ (FFR).

BackupEDGE can actually measure the overhead of switching into and out of the high-speed positioning mode for your particular tape drive, and use this information during restore operations. Specifically, Fast File Restore orders the files to be restored by tape position, and decides for each file or directory whether it is faster to use high-speed positioning or to simply read through the archive. The result is an incredibly fast restore that never requires more than a single pass across the tape (and even then, only if you request the last file!).

BackupEDGE provides three separate Fast File Restore interfaces to best suit the task at hand. The simplest of the three is our command-line interface (edge.restore), which allows you to name an archive device (local or remote) and then specify which files you'd like to restore on the command line. The utility then handles all the details of looking up the location of each file in the archive content database, and performs a highly optimized Fast File Restore procedure to restore your data.

Our second interface to FFR is through our EDGEMENU program. By navigating our intuitive menu system, you can browse the contents of an archive, and select those files and/or directories to restore from any drive to any machine with BackupEDGE installed. You need not even be concerned that you are using FFR in this case; the "slow" and "fast" options of the interface are identically easy to use.

Our third interface also involves EDGEMENU. If you know exactly what you want to restore, you may type those filename(s) in, and EDGEMENU will restore them directly.

If you are using optical media, removable hard drives, FTP/FTPS or Amazon S3 backups, BackupEDGE can start a restore practically instantaneously using Instant File Restore™ (IFR).

Last Updated - 2015/04/10