It may seem odd to some people that in this age of technological advancement in storage devices and external drives that many companies still bother using tape backup systems. This article details why backup tapes are still a popular choice in spite of modern competition.

It is fair to say that tape backup machines have been in operation in companies for decades now providing backup copies of companies systems and customer data. These tapes look more akin to something from the 1980’s than the modern external drives and storage systems in widespread use in homes around the country.

The fact is that system administrators primarily still use tape backup autoloaders and software for the sake of reliability. Since, any technology that has been in use for several decades is sure to have had all its niggling little bugs weeded out.

New operating systems have come along and the simplicity of tape backups means that it is possible to use them for backup and restore operations with little or no modifications. If you think of HDD storage, there was a stage when you couldn’t restore a Vista based system from HDD, whereas the tapes had no problems supporting it.

And in spite of the fact that they are slow to load and operate this is normally done using autoloaders so there is the speed issue is less of concern (certainly HDD or disk-to-disk would be the faster option).

In these recessionary times, the cost of a tape backup is so low that it positively encourages the creation of generations of system versions that can be easily stored away or sent to offsite tape storage facilities. And in comparison to a disk based storage device, a damaged tape can be simply slotted into a new cartridge and read from, whereas data recovery on a damaged hard drive could involve specialized equipment and software to salvage your data.