Organizations today have a massive amount of critical data that needs to be preserved. The regulatory requirements encompassed in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act as well as an overall increased awareness in industry of the need for tighter IT controls have only added to this need. Not only does this data need to be preserved, but it also needs to be stored securely, and it needs to be readily accessible, even if the backup media is stored offsite. In the event that a data anomaly or the like requires the data to be reloaded into the system, for example after data loss, or in the case of an audit procedure, the organization must be certain that uncompromised data can be accessed in a timely manner.

In many companies, from small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to enterprise-scale corporations, backup solutions are often comprised of a backup server running backup software that dumps data to a tape device, usually according to a periodic schedule based on the critical-nature of the data involved. Backup solutions such as these are commonly known as Disk-to-Tape backup systems, or D2T.

The top three types of data servers that companies focus on for backup operations are their database (particularly accounting or ERP databases), along with file and e-mail servers. Depending on the backup policy of a particular company, backups are performed either incrementally or fully. Incremental backups are performed at least once a day, while full backups are performed no less than once a month. Once a system backup has been made to tape media, the backup tapes are stored in a secure, environmentally controlled, and oftentimes offsite location.