How do you recover data from different backup media and formats?

Recovering data from various backup media and formats requires identifying the storage type (disk, tape, cloud) and format (full, incremental, image). Use compatible software to read and restore data, ensuring it's up-to-date and uncorrupted. For tapes, a compatible drive and software are needed, while cloud restores depend on the provider's interface. For older or proprietary formats, specialized tools or vendor support may be required. Always validate recovered data for integrity and consistency with the original source to ensure successful restoration.

Tape backups can provide a useful air gap to a backup environment. However, tape backups do not scale very well, are at risk of multiplex resulting in poor restore speed and can be difficult to implement in the enterprise space.

In my experience tape backups are the least reliable; they are damaged by heat, sunlight, radiation, magnetic fields and not to mention the media can be cut or damaged by any sharp object. The AI is wrong about tape backups. The biggest failure in tape rotation is the human, they have to be manually rotated unless you have a tape changer. Robotic tape arrays have lots of moving parts and are complicated. Still, they can be a viable option in certain situations.

Offsite tapes are isolated copies that need to be stored in a controlled environment to protect them from heat, humidity, water leaks, etc. In order to retain tapes for the long term, it's important to have a compatible reader to access the data. When the tapes reach the end of their life, it may be necessary to migrate the data to another tape technology.

While many disparage the use of tape for backup it still represents a least cost method for backing up huge amounts of data and sending it offsite for DR purposes. That said what's ideal is to implement a hybrid disk/tape backup that 1st writes to a local SAN/NAS and then duplicates the backup to tape which can be sent offsite for DR. Duplicating a local disk backup to tape has advantages aside from cost saving over cloud storage. With tape an organization can keep as many backups as needed even to the point of using a new tape every day. Modern tape technology has significantly improved reliablity, speed, and capacity. And don't forget how much faster you can perform a DR recovery from a tape as opposed to restoring from the cloud.

Disk backup fall into 2 categories: file & image. Both have advantages with image backup the gold standard in providing fast DR capability. File backup also has advantages in that you can select individual files & folders for backup whereas image is always by partition or disk. What's ideal is to have a backup solution that offers both file & image backup that can be run independently or concurrently. The later is perfect for imaging an OS partition for fast DR while file backup can be used for performing a combination of full and incremental backups of 10s of 1000s of small discrete files (e.g. WORD, Excel, etc.) rather than backing up an entire disk or partition to catch a couple 100 new files created that day.

Disks are more effective than tape for writing and restoring, but technical controls are necessary to prevent accidental erasure, unauthorized access, or ransomware attacks by implementing the WORM concept.

Disks are faster, can be cheaper than tape, are more robust and in my experience much MORE reliable than tape. The AI generated info is wrong here. They have lower risk of failure, corruption and theft vs tape. In most cases for on premises backup, disks are the way to go.

"Cloud Backups," or rather any backup that is stored on an off-site server, over the internet, is the best way to ensure data is available when needed. Yes, typically the software used to create the backup is required to do the restore and based on some subscription fee but these are the most reliable and available backup solutions. - Though awkward, the AI generated article is mostly correct on this one.

In my opinion, cloud backup is best when used in a hybrid model where an organization first backs up to local storage and then copies the backup to the cloud for offsite storage. This model offers extremely fast onprem restores and disaster recovery and has the cloud copy to recover from if the local backup is corrupted, damaged, or encrypted with ransomware. Your backup app should be integrated with your cloud providers immutablity storage feature to provide powerful ransomware protection from the cloud copy becoming infected. Cloud backup apps use full & incremental image backup technology so that daily/hourly backups to the cloud are small and fast and can be mounted for file/folder recovery along with partition/disk DR restores.

File backups are not 'backup media' but rather a way to store data on any type of media (tape, disk, cloud). The AI generated article is wrong on this. File backups store the files or folders specified in the backup job. They may use incremental, differential or full backup methods to use storage efficiently.

In the "beginning", and for many years thereafter, the only option to organizations was file backup to disk or tape! While that's no longer true there still is a place for file backup. A good example is when an organization has thousand to hundreds of thousands of small discrete files with only a tiny fraction of change that occurs on a daily basis. With file backup it's easy to maintain an online data depository of historical files that can be accessed as needed with only the new files that get created between backup sessions that actually get backed up. If this database of files was terabytes in size then a daily incremental or differential file backup would save considerable time & storage media space.

Image Backups are not a type of media but rather a backup methodology. Again, the AI generated article is wrong here. A backup image can be stored on any type of media.