Tape Drive Support for Windows Server 2008

You’ve probably heard – NTbackup has been discontinued and is no longer part of Windows Server.

Instead, it’s been replaced with a block-level backup system that effectively images your drives, and allows for bare-metal server restores to dissimilar hardware. You can read more about it in my article, How does Windows Server 2008 Backup work?

Where does this leave the millions of people with tape drives?

At BackupAssist, we have developed a backup engine that allows users to backup to a standalone tape drive on Windows Vista, Server 2008 and SBS 2008. In addition, users can protect backups with a password using 256-bit AES encryption, use real-time software compression to save storage space and fit more backups on to each backup device. As long as your tape drives ships with drivers, which all drives do, it’ll work with BackupAssist.

This backup engine is based on the ZIP64 standard, meaning you can now backup to tape using the trusted and proven ZIP file format.

To try this functionality, simply download BackupAssist! When you set up your backup job, choose the ’ZIP’ engine as the first step in the Wizard.