Your company currently writes a full backup to tape every Friday and incrementals Monday-Thursday. Management now demands recovery points every 15 minutes with restores that finish in seconds. The backup vendor recommends moving to an incremental-forever schedule that uses changed-block tracking and builds synthetic full backups inside the repository, eliminating I/O on production volumes. The repository must provide high-IOPS random access so the synthetic process completes quickly and individual files can be mounted instantly for testing. Given these requirements, which backup media type should you deploy as the primary on-site target?
An automated LTO-9 tape library with four drives and robotic changer
A high-capacity RAID-protected disk array or deduplication appliance attached to the backup network
A public-cloud object-storage bucket reached over the corporate Internet link
A Blu-ray optical disc jukebox that holds removable 100-GB media
A disk-based backup repository (for example, a RAID array or deduplication appliance) can handle the random read/write patterns needed to create synthetic full backups entirely within the backup storage. Disk offers near-instant random access, high concurrency, and features such as inline deduplication that allow incremental-forever schemes with sub-minute RPOs and rapid granular restore. Tape and optical libraries are sequential-access devices that cannot meet 15-minute RPOs without frequent, time-consuming full reads, and synthetic fulls on tape require multiple drives and are still slow. Public cloud object storage adds WAN latency and bandwidth limits, so it cannot guarantee second-level restores at the production site.
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