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

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.

Fully agree! Therefore I used the quotes (“) to show the irony of the sentence. Tapes are still extreme widely used and this report shows that this will even increase in the future! A lot of my customers use and will use tapes. Most of them prefer investing in tapes than in cloud-backup.

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

Tape is a super solution for long retentions.

Some of my clients want to keep yearly backups for several years, so tape is a easy solution to achieve this.

I hope VEEAM keeps up its efforts to improve tape support in their products. And yes, I have seen that there are several improvements in V11

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

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.

I am reviewing a FujiFilm offering but not sure where I would position it just yet.  We do have a product current QStar SOS that does the write to S3 and tape out.

We are in the process right now of testing a few tape solutions that front end to S3 and then tape out to a library.  We do have a solution but reliability has been an issue so I am doing PoCs for new ones to replace this.  We also integrate this with our in-house tool to use 4 factor authentication.

So a tape will look like:

 It will be available at the end of time.

tape is still the more secure way vs side attack if it out the tape library in a strong box in a faraday cage

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!

Well said Mike. The immutable backups have taken it on tape and it's just about time to see how long tapes will survive. 

Still, IMHO tapes are the best when it comes to total isolation to the digital world where anything including an immutable copy can be hacked. 

I hope people won’t be too greedy with immutability. It’s really concrete when the linux host who host XFS is enough hardened or you will always exposed to side attack (voluntary degradation)

i love it !!!!

ultimate solution against crypto ransomware

And tape cloning coming in v11!  - excellent..   

Tape 📼 Improvements in VBR v11 🔥 | Veeam Community Resource Hub

The roadmap for LTO looks promising 

I am looking at the PoiNT Archival Gateway.

Just Playing around at the moment. I will give some notes of my experiences to the community after I got some results.

@Chris.Childerhose and @JMeixner That sounds interesting. What product are you reviewing and where would you position that?

Petabyte tape cartridges are coming down the line!

According to Fujifilm, we could see 1PB cartridges from 2035!

https://blocksandfiles.com/2021/02/04/petabyte-tape-cartridges-are-coming/

Tape still secure. I reconize is old, but is GOLD. Salved a dozens of sysadmins jobs.

I have looked at such a solution just this week. I think it's very interesting.

Just collecting resources for a test 😁

I didn't even know that such solutions exist. So you have (immutable) object storage for quick copies/restores and tape for long term and offsite. Looking forward to see a blog post here :)

@JMeixner@Chris.Childerhose 

Once we decide on what solution I will try to do a blog post on it if my company permits me to. :)

Yes, but the data density increases from generation to generation and “compensates” this…

And… the tape gets thinner and thinner in each generation, so it makes sense to decrease the strain for the  tape.

Could be interesting as well: What is the physical speed of tape:

• LTO-6 @ 6.83 m/sec when reading or writing
• LTO-7 @ 5.01 m/sec 
• LTO-8 @ 4.731 m/sec

Interestingly, speed is decreasing from gen to gen.

https://blocksandfiles.com/2021/01/04/incremental-storage-media-density-magic-meant-flash-chipped-away-at-disk-in-2020/