Tape has served the world well. There was a time and place when tape made sense. It was a great way to make data transportable at a reasonable cost. It was the foundation of data backup and recovery. It allowed us to make our own music mixes and listen to them in our living rooms and cars. But now tape has seen its day. The music industry has eliminated tape from its inventory. We know that cassette could only be listened to so many times before the quality of the music began to degrade. The video industry is quickly eliminating tape also. No more fuzzy lines on the screen. Disc has quickly replaced these two industry’s media of choice with good reason. Quality! So, why oh why do we still treat our precious data as such a second-class piece of data?

Tedious. It takes a lot of time to manage, store, retrieve and recover from tape. Regular tape rotation, labels, indexes, manual labor are all basic parts of regular tape backup practices. To help ensure the quality of the tape backup, a test restore is recommended on every tape before it leaves the building.

Accident-Prone. We all agree that there is nothing glamorous about backing up data. No one really loves doing it; in fact most people don’t even like it being their responsibility. More often than not tending to the backup tape is the first thing skipped to address ‘more important things’ in the day. Once this neglect begins, the responsibility is then usually passed down to someone less senior and less technical who knows even less about the importance of the backup, and has no way of knowing its success rate. From there the tape either ends up sitting in the back of someone’s car for weeks on end or worse, sitting right on top of the server.

Pollution. That’s right, tape is environmentally unfriendly. Tape vendors recommend you rotate out your tapes at least yearly. Once they are used they lose their value to the point that their only destination is the landfill. For proper backup protection, after the tape has been written, the tape should be transported off-site for safe keeping. This is usually done by a fuel inefficient vehicle, generally left idling for hours on end during pickups and drop offs polluting the air. Once at the off-site facility, it is stored in a large building that uses vast amounts of energy to help ensure the tape lives at a steady climate. All the while, no one is really sure there is even any recoverable data on that tape to begin with.

Expensive. Don’t be fooled by tape manufacturers’ claims that they have the lowest costs: they are not painting the full picture. They don’t include the cost of the tape drives, libraries, maintenance and support, higher rate of down time, backup software, maintenance and support, training, failure response, personnel coverage during vacation, off-site storage vendor, emergency retrievals…the list can keep going.

Tape has served us well and helped us establish the portability of information in many industries but as the music and video industries have easily shown, there are much better, more reliable solutions available now to overcome all of these tape turn-offs. And for those of you who doubt me, I’m sure my iTunes library (which I can instantly access and listen to anywhere) trumps your cassette tapes…once we get back to your house and listen to them on your GE tape player.