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After 60 Years, Tape Reinserts Itself
Lucas123 writes "While magnetic tape is about as boring as technology gets, it's still the cheapest storage medium and among the fastest in sequential reads and writes. And, with the release of LTO-6 with 8TB cartridges around the corner and the relatively new open linear tape file system (LTFS) being embraced by movie and television markets, tape is taking on a new life. It may even climb out of the dusty archives that cheap disk has relegated it to. 'Over the last two years, disk drives have gotten bigger, they've gone from 1TB to 3TB, but they haven't gotten faster. They're more like tape. Meanwhile, tape is going the other direction, it's getting faster,' said Mark Lemmons, CTO of Thought Equity Motion, a cloud storage service for the motion picture industry."
Tape is a terrible thing to rely on. When you're backing up to a medium that has less reliability than your primary data storage, you have already failed.
Multiple Data Replication + Bit Rot Monitoring is the only thing that serves as a remotely reliable backup solution. Either from good cloud storage (e.g. Amazon S3) or through various more traditional non-cloud solutions (really the preferred option IMHO) from various vendors.
Amazon provides a 99.99999999999% SLA on data integrity for data stored in S3. Tape backup data integrity averages about 60%.
I would never use tape backup in this day and age.