[CLUE-Tech] Tape Drives - why?

[David Anselmi]

David L. Willson wrote:

> OK, I'm no newbie, and I find myself asking the same damn question every
> time I get into the Backup & Disaster Recovery design process.  Why does any
> business with less than a TB of data to backup use tapes?  Why, why, why,
> when almost any fixed disk media is much cheaper and almost as easy to take
> offsite?

In one office, I was using CDs.  When I outgrew that, I switched to 
external USB drives.  This is nightly full backups taken off site every 
day.  It happens to work in this case.

In another office I use tapes.  They haven't been more expensive than 
ATA disk (that will change over time I'm sure).  They are easier to take 
off site (3 or 4 tapes at a time).  The backup jobs don't fit on one 
tape so they span easily (with a tape library).  With several servers to 
back up I have a program that centrally manages all that (including 
cataloging the tapes so it's easy to find the right ones, whether they 
are off site or not).  And my office bought me the tape library and 
software so what the heck?  (This is for 800+GB of backup data.)

Dave