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Use cases for choosing a tape backup engine

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ONTAP supports two backup engines: SMTape and dump. You should be aware of the use cases for the SMTape and dump backup engines to help you choose the backup engine to perform tape backup and restore operations.

Dump can be used in the following cases:

  • Direct Access Recovery (DAR) of files and directories

  • Backup of a subset of subdirectories or files in a specific path

  • Excluding specific files and directories during backups

  • Preserving backup for long durations

SMTape can be used in the following cases:

  • Disaster recovery solution

  • Preserving deduplication savings and deduplication settings on the backed up data during a restore operation

  • Backup of large volumes