Is Tape Backup Really Dead? 4 Reasons It's Still Thriving
Backup Central, Monday, March 10th, 2025
Tape backup is not dead. In fact, more tape is sold today than ever before. This might come as a shock to those who've been told tape is obsolete technology that's been replaced by fancy disk-based systems and cloud storage
This blog post summarizes the main points of my latest podcast episode. If you'd like, you can listen to it or watch it at https://www.backupwrapup.com/)
- The Biggest Myth About Tape Backup - Let's start by killing the biggest myth about tape backup: that it died because it was 'too slow.' This is completely backward. Tape's biggest problem was actually that it was TOO FAST, not too slow.
Here's what I mean: Tape drives have two speeds - stop and very fast. They require data to flow at high speeds to function properly. When you don't feed a tape drive enough data, it has to start and stop constantly (what we call 'shoe-shining'), which makes the drive appear slow and unreliable.