The Xponential difference · Restore
Restore time: XPNTL staging vs conventional direct-to-tape
The Xponential difference · Backup window and RPO
Nightly backup: XPNTL staging vs conventional direct-to-tape
Full timeline for this restore
Built on the LTO Show Recovery Planner. Methodology and sources are public. With staging, staged data and tape restore at the same time and together are never faster than the network link. Staging read and write speeds come from the SSDs' figures, or estimates for the Deskside's 2-drive RAID; direct-to-tape backup and restore times and the RPO are the Planner's. The systems and staging sizes match the storage cost calculator. LTO Show and XPNTL Archive share an owner.
The restore cases
Recent project. You need back what you archived most recently, for example last month's shoot or last quarter's records. That is exactly what the staging tier still holds, so it comes back at disk or SSD speed, with no cartridge to load. This is where staging helps most.
Large project. A 100 TB restore: the newest part comes back from staging while the rest streams off tape at the same time.
Ransomware recovery. A 250 TB restore after an attack. The steps before any data moves (detection, forensic hold, a clean environment) take days and are the same with or without staging, so the calculator counts only the time data is moving.
Site loss. A 250 TB restore after losing a site, with media and hardware brought in first.
Nightly backup and RPO. Your recovery point objective is how much data you could lose: roughly the time between backups plus how long a backup takes. With staging, each night's changes land on disk or SSD at their speed, not tape speed, so the backup finishes sooner and the tape write follows in the background.
What the Planner models
Seven scenarios, from a single-file restore to ransomware and site loss. For each one it lays out the steps before data moves (detection, declaration, forensic hold, clean-room build, identity and key recovery, catalog rebuild, media retrieval), then the restore itself from your drives, network and restore target.
It names the bottleneck in your setup, separates a minimum viable restore from a full one, and shows the smallest change that meets your recovery target.
The Xponential difference
The catalog comes back with the tapes. XPNTL writes open LTFS, so each cartridge describes itself. There is no backup-software catalog to rebuild before you can find anything.
The known-good copy is already verified. Scheduled re-verification means you are not discovering, mid-incident, that the last good backup was unreadable.
Critical data first. Search the catalog, pick what the business needs today, and restore that before everything else.