At a glance, it may seem like tape backup systems are obsolete, a dinosaur, a thing of the past. After all, we have DVDs now that hold so much more information, there are mirror drives, and the whole Cloudware scenario.
In actuality, the tape backup systems of today are very different from the ones of even a decade ago, tape backups themselves are about as outdated as circuit boards. There may be a great deal of innovation, but none of that will replace the need to store data quickly and efficiently. Burning DVDs isn’t all that fast, and it’d still require someone to sit in front of every machine in a company and change them out. There’s simply no smooth way to automate backups with that technology. “But it’s a DVD, they’re HUGE!” Some may exclaim. Yes, and home hard drives are now exceeding terabyte proportions. The only real way to continue to handle the enormous demands for safeguarding data is by something which can be expanded. That means tape backups.
Today’s tape backup systems are nothing at all like most of us visualize. Huge spools of magnetic tapes are now gone, replaced by light, concise, efficient tape cartridges. You’re not going to be made to sit and wait for it to finish so you can change the tape either. Tapes hold a lot of data these days, and if there’s a need for multiple tapes, a robotic system will change them for you automatically. It will even keep them all cataloged. There’s nothing to take care of anymore, nothing to watch or tend to. If there’s an error, the tape backup system will either handle it automatically, or let you know about it, and suggest what needs to be done! A brief consideration of alternatives finds them lacking. A mirror drive won’t let you go back to yesterday or last week if you have data loss or suffer an infection, and if the building catches fire, the mirror drive is still going to burn along with the machine, leaving you at a total loss of irreplaceable information. Uploading your data to a paid service is nowhere near secure enough during transmission, far too slow for such large volumes of information, is expensive, and is still no guarantee that you’ll get your information back intact if you should suffer a loss! DVDs aren’t the solution either.
Tape backup systems have survived all these years because they work. They have improved and evolved, become quite sophisticated, but not at the risk of fragility. Today’s systems are expandable as well; you can buy a smaller system now and add on to it as your need for safe storage grows. The archived data cartridges are easily transferred to an off-site location for safe keeping. All of these things make tape backup systems both the past and the future of our ever-growing need for data security for years to come!
