People claim that “the gang has been dead” for 20 years. LiveVault, one of the pioneers of online backup, claimed that "backup to tape is a big part of the last century" in 2003. That was pretty bold, considering few companies had ever backed up entirely to disk. at that moment. About the Author Peter Groucutt is the Managing Director of Databarracks. We started tracking backup methods in 2008 with our annual survey, The Data Health Check. At this point, 42% of organizations were still using tape for their backups, while only 23% were using cloud-to-disk and online backup. By 2021, only 4% of them still use tape as their only backup method and the use of online and cloud backup has increased to 51%. However, an additional 15% use a combination of disk and tape. It seems to us far from being "dead". So why did he stay so long?
The challenge of migrating from tape
For starters, it's not easy to get away from the gangs. Tape is difficult and slow to completely remove due to the years of historical backups you must keep. Small businesses can often make a clean break and switch to a new method. If you only maintain a short backup retention period, you can run two solutions in parallel during this period before disabling the older solution. However, large organizations and those with compliance requirements must retain tape drives and tapes for several years. You probably won't need to restore from these old backups often, but failing to do so could result in significant fines from your regulator. This deters some businesses from relocating due to the cost and labor involved in managing two backup methods while old holds expire.
Cost considerations
Another reason is that the tapes are incredibly cheap. When cloud backup services were introduced, the high cost of disk storage and bandwidth made the service too expensive for most. As storage and bandwidth costs have fallen, online or cloud backup has become affordable for most. The cost of tape is still less, but the added benefits of automation, control, and reliability make cloud backup the preference for most (by 2021, more than half of organizations are using cloud backup). on the cloud). However, there are a small number of organizations that store such large volumes of data that tape is their only option. When you're protecting multiple petabytes of data, for example, this cost difference between disk and tape becomes significant.The physical air gap
Tape backups also have the advantage of being physically separate and offline from the systems they protect. This is not unlike the story of "Kremlin security buying typewriters to prevent leaks" - the return to older technology offline. Of course, there are logical ways to "space out" and separate your cloud backups from your production environment, but they don't capture the imagination quite the way the idea of tape does.Why stay away from the gang?
For many, the idea of relying on degradable magnetic storage media is too great a risk. For us, the most important reasons to switch to a modern solution are automation and reliability. Tape backups are a very manual process. You load the tapes, someone picks them up and transports them to offsite storage. When you need to recover, you must recover the tape and perform the restore. Tape libraries help, but they don't completely solve the problem. The multiple bottlenecks of the last 18 months have highlighted how important it is to have systems that can continue to function without personnel physically on site to operate them. As a result, many organizations that have put off their decision to stop using magnetic tape are finally making the switch.