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Recent Sales Hint That Tape For Storage Is Far From Dead
hightechchick writes "Staples' business-to-business sales of backup tape for storage are experiencing a bit of a revival. What's next, a return to dumb terminals and mainframes (a la cloud computing)?"
I'm guessing this story was posted by someone with absolutely no experience with enterprise-level businesses.
The business I work for goes through tapes like they're used to make coffee. Primary use: legal escrow of source code.
You're an idiot, Starscream.
Tape is not legacy - it's the industry standard.
Believe it or not, being old is not the same as being obsolete.
In fact, in this industry, being old is a testament to how reliable something is.
Compression? Deduplication? Seeding remote sites? What fantasy world do you live in?
Tape is a storage medium.
You can compress anything and store it on the tape.
Deduplication is not a backup mechanism.
Backups need to be made before going live and routinley afterward. Full backups.
Tape is easy to restore from. You need full/incremental backups with tape exactly as you need them with a remote location. If it's attached to a machine it's a copy, NOT a backup. A backup must be remote, unpowered, and protected from Earth, Fire, Wind, Water, and Heart (thieves) etc.
It's not difficult to know if data is safe. Just try to restore it. If you're not testing your restore process, you're an idiot, regardless of what method you're using. Tape is the most reliable storage format we have today.
You can reuse tapes all the time. Such inefficiencies only matter if you're backing up data that's a fraction of a single tape. If this is the case, just buy more tapes. They're very cheap. If this is not the case, then you'll never run into the problem because each tape you write to will be part of a set of tapes corresponding to an individual backup job, and all but one of that set will be completely utilized.
It's not a needless nightmare. It's a necessary nightmare. And it's not a nightmare. There's this thing called a label maker. Alternatively, labels and a Sharpie. Alternatively still, tape, paper, and a pen.
No sir, it is you that deserves the beating.
Yeah but accessing your drive contents only through iTunes would be pretty clunky.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.