I've seen tape media offered by online retailers as a backup medium but just ignored it thinking "Tapes? BAH! Preposterous!" but I decided to look a bit more closely and saw that a single $60 tape can store 2.5 TB or 6.5 TB compressed. My question is, who uses this? Why? And why isn't it more common?
Its not as common because to read back data from tape media you have to start from the start of the tape and you have to go through all off it until you find what you need. Yes it stores more for cheap but its not as fast. Its good for long term backups. Backups that you want to put away and archive.
My professor was talking about it and his company did it for a long time. However at one point they needed to recover some of the data so then went in the archive and found out they had an error and was corrupted.
This error was actually accured for a long time but the people just didn't notice it because they would put in a tape drive press backup and leave. In the morning it would be done and they would just put it in the archive. So actually many of the archives were corrupted.
Thanks. So who uses it and why? I get that it's cheap but it seems like it would leave a lot of room for error like the scenario you described and a lot of the money saved by using tape would be lost in the amount of time spent just dealing with it. I can't decide if I love it or hate it right now.
Companies that want to have long term backup archives. Its cheap but has a ton of storage.
"One of the major disadvantages of tape drives is they are stored in sequential access:to read data from anywhere on the tape drive, you must start at the beginning of the tape and read until you come to the sought after data." Quoting from A+ Guide to Managing And Maintaining Your PC Chapter 6 Page 264. You can get the book here: Take a look at it.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/3v18tlzifo8hd1a/A%2B%20Guide%20to%20Managing%20And%20Maintaining%20Your%20PC%2C%208th%20Edition.pdf
If you want to do long term backups like archives then it would be good. They also have encryption. I have a feeling that they would be easier to destroy than hard drives.
I've got a friend that backs up to tape drives. He uses it as a double redundant backup (he backs up to a server, as well as dvd), and only the stuff he REALLY wants to keep safe makes it to tape. Customer records, legal stuff, other work stuff etc.
So yeah, like others have said, it's really only good for long term/permanent back-up. For anything else, it's incredibly inconvenient.
Interesting. Thanks gents.