Using Tapes for Data Backups: Pros, Cons, and Alternatives
Tape backup is a term that is often applied to old or outdated technologies, but tapes are still used in today’s IT world.
Large corporations such as banks, financial institutions, and hospitals still rely on magnetic systems to ensure important data is securely stored for long term future use. Magnetic film is still used to store data on physical and portable media such as cassettes, film, and floppy diskettes.
Advantages of Magnetic Film
The main positive aspects of magnetic storage are: resilience, dependability, and durability. Cassettes can be stored for decades leading to a much longer shelf life than any other media. Also magnetic cartridges are not prone to power surges that can affect other backup solutions.
Disadvantages of Using Tapes
The cons of magnetic systems include time, costs, and storage capacity. It takes much time to write and read from a wound film, which leads to higher costs in employee involvement and storage facilities.
Why are cassettes so slow? The data rate is slow due to a lower bit density on the tape and its sequential nature. In addition, the film 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. Magnetic film may provide several tracks in parallel but that type of technology cannot provide rapid random access. For this reason, backup utilities for magnetic cartridges 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 when planning on purchasing a system. Because the costs involved in this type of system are far higher than most other options, one should consider whether durability is really important enough to justify the cost.