Tape Backup: Pros, Cons, and Alternatives
Tape backup is a term that is often applied to old or outdated technologies, but tape backup is still used in today’s IT world.
Large corporations such as banks, financial institutions, and hospitals still rely on tape backup systems to ensure important data is securely stored for long term future use. Tape backup consists of backing up data onto a physical and portable media such as cassettes, film, and floppy diskettes.
Advantages of Using Tape Backups
The main positive aspects of tape backup are: resilience, dependability, and durability. Tape backup can be stored for decades leading to a much longer shelf life than any other media. Also tape backups are not prone to power surges that can affect other backup solutions.
Disadvantages of Using Tape Backups
The cons of tape backup include time, costs, and storage capacity. It takes much time to make a tape backup leading to higher costs in employee involvement and storage facilities.
Why are tape backups slow? The data rate is slow due to a lower bit density on the tape. Then, tapes need to be rewound; hence, the seek time is enormous compared to the >10 ms random access time of standard hard drives. In addition, hard drives have dozes of heads to read and write data. Tapes may have several tracks in parallel but the tape technology cannot quick provide random access. For this reason, backup software for tape backups need to be tape aware, whereas backup programs for random-access devices can exploit the quick access times and achieve better performance through more sophisticated algorithms.
Summary
If you are interested in investing in a
tape backup solution, you will need to analyze the pros and cons
of tape backup when planning on purchasing a tape backup
solution.