Patent ID: 8112579

Claim:
A selection apparatus that selects a destination of data to be saved out of a plurality of tape recording apparatuses, comprising: a history information storage unit that stores history information about data lengths of past data saved in any of the plurality of tape recording apparatuses; a rank determination unit that determines a data length rank for the data to be saved based on the history information about the data lengths of the past data read out from the history information storage unit; a rank list storage unit that stores a performance rank list for the plurality of tape recording apparatuses; a selection unit that selects a tape recording apparatus for saving the data to be saved out of the plurality of tape recording apparatuses based on the performance rank list read out from the rank list storage unit and the data length rank determined by the rank determination unit so that data saving in the plurality of tape recording apparatuses is performed efficiently as a whole; and a transfer unit that transfers the data to be saved to the tape recording apparatus selected by the selection unit, wherein the rank determination unit ranks the data to be saved high if the data to be saved is judged to have a data length occurring frequently from the history information, and the selection unit selects a tape recording apparatus with a high performance for the high-ranked data to be saved.