Tape Backup is another more expensive solution that most people can’t afford. Magnetic tape backup is a mature technology that has existed in many forms since the early 1950s; it traditionally offers users a relatively low unit cost.

Magnetic tapes come in a variety of sizes and capacities, including cassettes, in three-quarter inch, half-inch, and eight millimeter.

The disadvantages of tape backup are the inherent inefficiency in the administration and indexing of large amounts of data. There is a high level of manual maintenance for tapes and tape drives and tapes also often require an expense manually-administered tape library.

Another disadvantage of tape backup is that while disk-based data storage provides random data access points, tape drive data depends on sequential data access, adding time to data recovery.

In addition, magnetic backup tapes report high failure rates for data recovery making them an unreliable form of data backup compared to disk-based backup systems.

Tape backup is increasingly used for low availability archiving for non-critical data, while mission-critical data is stored on hard disk and other more reliable and more responsive storage media.

Contact us today to learn how storage/backup administrators backup their data and save time and money while increasing reliability.