So…I was wondering. Is there any backup tape system that would be advisable to use for backing up some TBs? I guess I need it to be USB, as the server is a micro PC, one of those tiny ones you can hang from behind a monitor. It’s an HP ProDesk.
Thanks!
This is the answer.
I haven’t done the math, but even SMB’s don’t use tape today.
They may do a local replica and then some kind of local-hardware-based cloud backup solution, because cost and capability.
Large companies still use tape for their large data sets. Tape has some useful advantages that make it worth it in very specific situations.
The first is when you have a lot of data - if you have several hundred of even thousands tapes (likely including duplicates!) then the quantity of data you have backed up is large enough the tapes are the cheapest.
The second - as hinted above - is duplicates. If you don’t want the data lost a tape is a good answer to have several copies. While a disk might be cheaper, they are fragile and computers are not designed to swap disks that often. Even USB which is designed for swapping isn’t that good: the connector will physically wear out a lot faster than you would expect making the costs much higher to manage this. Plus the labor to plug/unplug a lot of drives will get you.
Third, some tapes come in a write once form. If you have data that (often for legal reasons) you need to store such that it cannot be modified later then tape is often you best answer to ensure the data really wasn’t changed. (either by an executive hiding their tracks, or an attacker trying to put ransomware on you).
That said, for most reading this, a few disks in a NAS is better than about 98% of people have and if you have snapshots on the NAS probably good enough for everything (your only risk is fire or theft of the NAS - if you cannot live with this get a second NAS elsewhere, or a cloud backup), similar cost, and has enough other useful features that you want it anyway.
Does make you wonder who does use tape? Id assume big businesses just use cloud, so who is left that uses tape?
Depending on what cloud tier you are using they might use tape then (e.g. IBM Cloud Object Storage Deep Archive).
Don’t clouds mostly just rely on replication across zones though?
I would have thought tapes were just too slow to be useful in that environment.
I’ll read up on the IBM deep archive.
Many use just HDDs. The load delay is usually because they don’t want to spin up every disk just for one chunk of a file, so they collect jobs and schedule spin up and down times.
But there are dedicated services that indeed use tape.
I always assumed that’s why the cheaper longer term storage took so long to recover (having to physically retrieve copies, even if it’s automated), but I have no real knowledge on it. Interesting.