Do you agree or disagree that "tape backups are deprecated" ?

Question

Details are always appreciated. I really thought they were, but I don't know why; I am open to voting my "best answer" answer on either side of the issue. As a bonus question, would you be so kind as to help me find employment in the San Francisco area? The last place I worked didn't like me after I asked this question; I lost my job and need to find some work. Thank you in advance for your time in answering this.

Answer 1

Disagree. Never under estimate the bandwidth of a truck loaded with LTO-3s.

Sure, if you're a home user then you can get away with RAID-1. With a business your data is critical. You can duplicate your systems across different sites, but then you need at least two offices, and a fixed high-bandwidth link between the two. When compared to getting a bomb-proof safe, the costs are easy to see.

Answer 2

I disagree.

While tape backups are a very old technology and have many disadvantages, they are still better in certain circumstances. Keep in mind that although the fundamental technology of tape backups is old, tape drives have been greatly improved over the years.

The advantages of a tape drive are that they are extremely cheap relative to the amount of data that they hold, that they can be overwritten (as opposed to a CD or DVD backup), and that the individual tapes small in physical size, and are thus easy to transport or archive, and yet are fairly sturdy and durable.

The disadvantages of a tape drive are obviously the fact that the backup must be written and read sequentially (in order). This makes them suitable for backing up or restoring whole servers at once, but bad for transferring individual files or storing anything that changes often. One other disadvantage is that you need to have someone physically remove the tape--so they are not suited to 100% automated backups.

These perspectives that I have presented certainly reflect industry usage--tape drives are still common for regular server backups, and they are hardly ever used for more dynamic sorts of backups. I've worked as a computer consultant and I've set up a number of tape backup systems, as well as worked with existing ones, and once I restored files off a tape backup system. I must say that as a backup system, they are relatively painless to work with--the technology is tried and true, simple to set up and use, and inexpensive relative to the huge amount of storage you get. Most organizations that have serious backup needs use both tape and disk (usually network->disk) backups.

I've included a link to a site that explains the pro's and con's. The fact that there are a number of "pro's" should show you that tape backups are not fully deprecated--although who knows? We may find that they eventually do become deprecated.

Answer 3

Disagree - They can take so much data and are amazing to backup complete systems in one go.

However like all tapes only one point can be read at one time so to find the wanted data can be time comsuming.

Answer 4

hell no they are not deprecated!! any business uses tapes for their backups, I mean, what other options are out there for that much Gigabite capacity? In fact the tape technology is being improved, from speed, capacity and reliability, to tape checking and packet moving so you don't loose your valuable information. I don't see it going under by any means.

Cheers.

Answer 5

Could there be any replacement for cost effective way to store legacy data? When you got to store gazillions of bytes which would not be referred to over say 20 years or more but still you need to record it all. Can you choose DVD, yes but for what price?

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Ck
http://www.gfour.net

Answer 6

not sure what ur on about lol

Answer 7

big words say little

Answer 8

i don't know