When is the last time you heard someone say, “I’ll just throw that file on a floppy drive for you”? Floppies enjoyed nearly three decades as the ubiquitous form of data storage and data transfer from the mid 1970s to the late 90s. At one point or another, we were all at the point where we used floppy drives and praised their usability because, frankly, there was no other solution which was as cost effective or reliable.
These days, floppies are a thing of the past and have been largely superseded by USB flash and “thumb” drives, external hard drives, CDs, DVDs, and flash memory cards. Many computer manufacturers realized the fall of the floppy drive and dropped them from their product lines, starting with Apple in 1998. Soon thereafter Dell, HP, and Sony dropped floppy drives from their computer lines as well.
We see a similar pattern with tape drives. Tapes were relatively inexpensive and afforded a reliable method to store data for the long term. While tape drives were once regarded as a long-term data storage medium primarily for archiving purposes, tape is quickly being replaced by other, more effective, means of archival storage. Is tape still sufficient for today’s data protection and archival needs where restoration of data during a crisis has to be done in near real time?
Businesses require effective and reliable data backup and disaster recovery mechanisms that can guarantee data recovery in near real time to assure business continuity in the event of a major data disaster.
Listed below are some of the major disadvantages of Tape based backup solution according to CRC Data Protection.
- Time Consuming
- Vulnerable to damage, theft or loss
- Unprotected
- Inefficient in managing and administering large data backup sets
- Platform Dependant
- High Recovery Failure rates as high as 20 – 50 percent, making it an unreliable form of data backup.
One more important thing to note here is the trend that both Floppy Drive and Tape Drive share amongst themselves, as illustrated in the following Google search trends for between 2004 and 2010:
This graphic illustrates that tape and floppy storage is following similar trends in the market. The reason: more businesses and consumers are looking to high-recoverability backup solutions such as online-based backup.
In today’s market dynamic, the total cost of ownership for tape based backup or archiving is much higher than using disk-based backup. Tape-based backup and restore can also consume a huge amount of time. Tape drives, unlike completely automated disk based online backups or on-premise backups, require a lot of human intervention to change tapes, replace and label old tapes. If not properly managed, your business can end up with serious data loss and mismanaged backups. For this reason, it makes sense to look at options for faster backup and recovery times, reduced overhead, and simplified storage management in your backup and archiving solution.
Tags: backup to disk, backup trends, online backup
