Oxford Style Debate – Episode 2: Tape Is Dead. Or Is It? Let’s Debate.

I totally understand your point. I felt some of this pain recently during a large recovery from tape.

In my case, we had around 130 VMs in the same media pool, so the restore was not simple at all. Loading/unloading tapes, finding the right restore points and planning the restore order made everything slower than a disk restore.

But we followed a priority strategy: AD, databases, logistics systems and critical services first. The goal was not to restore everything at once, but to make the environment operational again. Medium and low impact VMs came after.

And this is the point for me: it was not perfect, but it worked.

The backup server was compromised, repositories were compromised, and storage replication was compromised. Without the offline tapes, we would basically have nothing to restore from.

So yes, tape is painful sometimes. It is not perfect and it is definitely not the fastest option. But when it is well planned, with good media pools, media sets, rotation, maintenance and proper handling, it can still save the environment.

Another important point is cost. In projects, when we identify that an environment is not really following a 3-2-1 strategy, we usually recommend different ways to improve resilience: immutable repositories, object storage, backup copy, tape, offsite copies, etc.

But not every environment can adopt the ideal strategy right away. Some still rely on a very simple local backup strategy, and cost has a huge weight in these decisions.

So for me, tape is not about convenience. It is about having something to restore when everything else is gone, without making the cost impossible for the customer.