Tape Wars: "I'm not dead yet!"

I keep seeing more items about tape in magazines and online, so I thought I should post a few of them.

Computer Technology Review‘s most recent print issue (or the most recent one to reach me, anyway) has a story headlined “Tape is Here to Stay.” Why? According to the author, Rich Harada, president of the Tape Technology Council (and therefore perhaps just a little biased, as are the disk-based-backup manufacturers proclaiming tape’s demise), tape remains the least expensive way to add storage capacity—at least if you have a tape system in place already. Disk-based backup systems are “perfect complements to tape subsystems” and tape is “the most adaptive storage technology for over 50 years.”

Well, maybe, but that doesn’t absolve it of all the problems people have had with it. I don’t know any small-business users who prefer tapes to hard disks or optical disks as a backup medium. The gentleman protests too much, methinks.

If your company is committed to tape (and the cost of setting up an automated tape backup system for large quantities of data amounts to quite a commitment), you might want to follow some of the suggestions made in a couple of other recent articles.

From Baseline‘s June issue come Briana Hallstrom’s 7 Steps for keeping tabs on your backup tapes (slightly abbreviated by yours truly):

I’m not sure step 6 counts as a tip for managing tapes, but the others seem like sound, even obvious advice, and beg the question “Why aren’t companies doing this already?”

And on Monday Curtis Preston wrote an opinion piece for Computerworld called “A Simple Solution for Lost Tapes,” in which he recommends:

There will always be some hackers good enough to break any code, but it seems to me that the least you can do is keep the amateurs out. And if you’re looking to start a career in computing, the tape-encryption business is booming.

To read other FileSlinger™ Backup Blog posts about this subject, type “tape” into the search box at the top of the right column.