Tape Backup: Why do businesses still use it in 2024?

In a fast-paced world filled with data-driven decisions, losing your data can have severe repercussions on your business. Data loss can cause financial issues and lead to a poor reputation as a business. With the prevalence of data breaches, cyber-attacks, and basic human error, finding efficient ways to store your data matters when it comes to safeguarding your business data. Among the many digital options, some businesses use a unique form of data backup that effectively stores digital copies of documents. Tape backup is a format that, despite its antique appearance, has many benefits. We’re here to explain why some businesses use tape backups as an effective way to store their data and help you decide whether to use them for yourself or move towards more digital, cloud-based solutions for your business.

What is Tape Backup?

Tape backup is a traditional backup procedure that uses magnetic tape or any tape cartridge as the storage device. Enormous amounts of data in the hard disk can be duplicated into the tape such that in the event of an unfortunate hard disk crash, the data can be restored. Although end users already prefer disk or online backup storage, tape backup continues to exist in large enterprises because of its archival stability.

Why do businesses still back up to tape?

When comparing magnetic tape to other backup storage options, including disk drives, file servers, and cloud platforms, this is the best media for archiving your data. As long as magnetic tape is an offline means of data storage, it is highly secure. Unlike most other backup storage media, tape is not vulnerable to hacking and cyberattacks. Data is separated from the read/write operations, which creates the so-called “air gap”, thus ensuring ultimate protection against a wide range of risk factors.

Another important factor is the attractive cost. A 1TB portable hard drive is almost 10 times more expensive than a tape cartridge with the same capacity. It is true that the price of hard drives and solid-state storage media continues to decrease, while the capacity of a disk may reach as much as 16TB. Magnetic tape storage, however, has no capacity limits, provided that you are running a reliable system for managing and storing the tape cartridges.

Another strong side of tape backups is the low storage requirements. Unlike disk and flash-based systems, tape cartridges do not require power, cooling, etc. Ideally, cartridges should be stored in an environment where you can control temperature and humidity, but you can also keep them in a regular office.

The above-mentioned characteristics turn tape into a perfect option for data storage and archiving, even when considering some of the challenges this media is associated with.

Tape Backup Advantages

Tape offers advantages over hard disk drives and flash—especially when it comes to storing large amounts of backup and archival data. Here are the most common.

• Cost – A recent study into sustainability found the 10-year total cost of ownership (TCO) of 10 PB of storage and a 35 percent annual growth in capacity to be about eight times cheaper for tape than disk. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and Microsoft Azure all make heavy use of tape in their cold storage tiers.
• Disk Capacity Reduction – Organizations that keep all their data on disk see the price add up and power bills escalate. According to Storage Switzerland, enterprise backup repositories are typically 10 times bigger than ongoing production data—instead of storing a lot of data that may never be accessed on disk, organizations can switch it to tape and reserve disk for applications and data that demand higher performance.
• Security – Tape offers secure data storage—by retaining tape cartridges offline, disconnected from any network, they are immune to ransomware attacks and other unauthorized access. In addition, the Linear Tape Open generation 9 specification includes multi-layer security support with hardware-based encryption, immutable Write Once, Read Many (WORM) functionality, and fast data access with both the Linear Tape File System (LTFS) and Recommended Access Order (RAO).
• Transfer Speeds – A single LTO-9 tape cartridge can hold 45 TB of compressed data (18 TB native) with transfer speeds of 400 MB/s (native) or 1,000 MB/s with 2.5:1 compression—considerably faster than HDDs.
• Density – LTO operates at areal densities about two orders of magnitude better than the latest HDDs—when compared to an 18 TB disk, the latest 18 TB LTO-9 needs a small fraction of the areal density.
• Sustainability – Moving cold and inactive data from disk to tape can bring about a reduction in carbon emission by up to 97 percent, according to a Brad Johns Consulting study. Data centers consume around 2 percent of all electricity in the United States, and storage consumes about 20 percent of total data center power. Tape uses power only when data is being actively read or written; a tape cartridge on a shelf or sitting idle in a tape library consumes no energy, unlike disks, which are always spinning.
• Longevity – Data gradually starts to degrade on hard disk drives. Keeping data on disk for more than five years is asking for trouble—tape offers 30 years of longevity or more.

Disadvantages of Tape Backup

• The high price for tape drives and tape libraries. Tape backup systems require you to use a tape backup drive, whose price is high, or a tape library whose price is even higher (unlike the price for affordable tape cartridges).
• Random access to the recorded data is not supported with only sequential access available. As a result, you need a long time to find the needed file or directory on a tape medium (the tape must be rewound when seeking data) when performing recovery.
• Tape cartridges are sensitive to magnetic fields, unlike hard disk drives.
• Low data copying speed. Slow read/write speed compared to hard disk drives. Restoring data from a tape storage backup can take a long time.

Conclusion

In modern data storage, tape backing is of vital importance. Although the popularity of cloud backup has grown, tape backup offers several benefits over other storage methods, such as cost-effectiveness, high capacity, durability, and long life. Also, the option to backup tape for disaster recovery is a reliable and safe one. For businesses that wish to safeguard their data for the future, tape backup will continue to be a valuable option, given ongoing storage needs.