WHY COMPANY PREFER TAPE DRIVES AS DATA BACKUP MEDIA ?

It has been observed that many companies prefer it even today (about 80% of the digital data even today is stored on tapes.) even when many new devices such as flash drives, portable hard drives or even CDs and DVDs have come up as data backup media. Let us have a look at the reasons for the same by considering the advantages that tape drives offer.

Advantages of Tape Drives

In tape drives, it is not possible to access any data randomly but it can be accessed only sequentially. But even with this apparent disadvantage, high data transfer speeds (up to 80 MB per second) can be achieved on them. The randomness in access of data is also not required generally as most of the data backup is carried out just to comply with the laws of disaster management and these data are rarely accessed in reality except when a disaster strikes.

Another significant advantage of tape drives is the amount of storage space that they offer. It ranges from a few Megabytes to about 800 GB that too without compression. With such a large amount of space available, a single tape drive could prove to be sufficient for all the data that you may need to backup.

To add to the above mentioned capacity, tape drives offer you a high compression ratio, which means that the data that is to be stored on the drive can be compressed to even half its original size.

Also, with the technological advancements in the form of new storage media, the tape drives also have not been left behind. They have shown a vast amount of improvement over the years since 1951 when the tape drive was first introduced.

Cost is always an area of prime importance when data backup is concerned. Tape drives are quite cost efficient as well and are cheaper than most other forms of data storage when the ratio of cost per amount of data that is stored is taken into account. This makes the tape drives affordable especially for small businesses which do need to backup the data but cannot afford to invest a large sum of money for the same purpose.

Another possible advantage of tape drives is the tape library system which helps you keep your data organised and this particular process is automated as well. The software that is used for the same has also shown a lot of development over the years.

The reliability of storage of data on tape drives has been in question many times. But nowadays even that is not a thing to worry about since the tapes keep your data quite safe for a long period of time though not as long a time as offered by hard disks. But this is amply compensated by the cost difference between the two.
Corruption of data that has been backed up is a problem that has been faced by many companies so far and the only solution for the same is making multiple copies of the same data. Practicing the same by using disks proves to be very expensive and hence a backup copy on a tape is generally preferred.

Where security is the concern, tape drives also have not been left behind and the newer versions offer options such as WORM (Write Once Read Many) which allow data to be written on the disks only once and it can be accessed many times. Other features such as encryption are also available. They also limit access to the data to a particular geographical location so that the data cannot be stolen over the internet.

The Last Word

The tape drives are also expected to hold a large share in the market in the years to come as tapes which can store up to 2 TB (Terabytes) of data are expected to be developed within 5 years from now. Given all these advantages, it is no wonder that tape drives remain the preferred backup media even today!