"Still" use tape for backup? Interesting reading about tape usage in 2020 and in future.

It’s amazing the density increases we’ve achieved by sticking to specific form factors such as tape, 3.5” HDD and microSD. Comparing where they started to now and the lack of any signs of slowing down is a testimony to what the human race can do!

Yes, you should schedule tape-to-tape copy after some years.

Some people miss this factor, more tape generation evolved more they are sensitive to humidity. It’s more than a typical disk.

Don’t miss this because some Datacenter don’t measure this. It’s crucial to don’t have a big surprise

I think tape is great, I think the stigma it suffers is due to misuse like deduplication appliances. The issue isn’t in the technology but it’s deployment. I don’t believe tape should be used as an air gap solution (or not the primary air gap solution at least), for a single reason, it’s so slow!

I was dispatched to a school trust due to a ransomware attack, I discovered due to the attack vector and the entire backup solution being domain joined the primary backup repo had been encrypted, the customer then proceeded to recover from tape but it took between 1-2 weeks for all of their data to be recovered and brought online. It was nearly a week before core services were even restored.

With solutions such as Veeam Cloud Connect it makes sense to use VCC for air gap and keep tape for long term archiving purposes only. Most customers will keep their tape systems far longer than necessary and this causes them larger issues in the long run when using this as their DR response.

With v11 pushing immutability this will provide a better fault domain for customers not wishing to go to the cloud route.

@regnor , no, I think for offline - or even offsite - backups we will have tape for a long time… You cannot carry your disk based backups offsite - at least not easy and without problems…

And it is cheap - after you have bought the library and some tape, then addng tapes costs not much...

Yes, there are a lot of new tape-features in v11, other enterprise-backup solutions had for years. Gap is getting smaller and smaller! 

true story friend, imho let's say the best setup for data protection is:

- primary storage backup 7 -10 days

- storage tier cloud medium term backup with data immutability enabled

- Tape for long long retention alternatively

I had designed but I have to test it, storage snapshot primary backup and storage sync volume on a secondary storage (similar to an airgap backup) and subsequent vaulting on tape

backup tapes are widely used to make a sort of airgap backup and to fulfill the 3-2-1 backup offsite for the win rules.