Almost every small business that I’ve had a chance to work with has used tapes as their primary means of backing up data (the others have had no backups or no data to backup). Tapes are used widely for several good reasons: they can be stored and archived for many years, they are fairly inexpensive, easy to rotate, and many backup software packages are designed around the use of them. But have you ever had to restore from tape? It’s a tedious process. First, you have to find the tape (or tapes) that has the data you want to restore from (hope you’re labeling them well!), then you have to catalog it, then you have to mount and restore it… something that should be so simple can actually be an excruciating process. After all of that (and the time it takes if you’ve been there) you had better hope that the backup was tested, otherwise it may not even restore properly. What if your business is completely down until the restore is done? That would make for a very stressful day.

In my opinion, tape is a legacy technology. Disk and flash storage is so affordable these days that companies can easily purchase storage capacity that can exceed the amount of space that they have with tapes. This can translate to faster and more reliable backups, longer retention periods, and more available space for future growth. Restores are usually completed faster, too. Interested in a hybrid model? Tapes can still be a good means of off-site archival. Or, you can look into cloud based backups options or even offsite disk-based backups. The options are out there, but you have to make the choice for the backup solution that is best for your business.