External Factors?

While I agree that tape is becoming 'old hat', there may be other factors affecting the decline in sales that can't simply be mapped out over the next 20 years.

Global Recession. Companies feeling the squeeze are more likely to reuse and extend the life of tapes to cut costs (never mind financial types 'forgetting' to back stuff up to cover up huge blunders.)

Avaliablity of larger capacity tapes (less required, init?)

Intermediate backup. We use a cheap and cheerfull SATA array to store temporary daily backups and only go to tape for the weekly archive backup. Again, less tapes, but we still need 'em.

curve

Extracting a geometric progression from one sample of a common ratio ? See any problems there?

Curvy!

Lovely curve, but does it have any basis in reality? I suspect tape will never quite go away, but it will become an ever-more niche business. And so it it should decline asymptotically- approaching but never reaching zero. Much like the curve in the article.

Disappearing Tape?

Just curious if anyone knows how many hard drives it would take to store 1 Petabyte of data??

I'm not worried about tape media 'becoming irrelavant' any time soon....

Thanks, you saved me some reading there.

I haven't bothered to read the article after spotting the fancy graph with, generously, 20/23*100=86.96% made up numbers. I don't know what way the wind'll blow but I do know these are distant cousins to the itanic projections.

Simple logic tells me there will remain a market for backups, in fact lots of critically important data isn't backed up at all currently, and lots more data gathering is in the planning (despite some token gestures by the current new crop of lying thieves, er, right honourable politicians). Backups need longevity, recoverability, but don't need performance, though with disk as cheap as it is, tape does need to become much cheaper or much faster, preferrably both, to retain its niche. But *some* form of cheaper-than-primary-disk mass storage will remain in demand. If you think "the cloud will take over", well, how recoverable is a cloud failure, anyway? Going to phone amazon for your lost bits?

Surely

SSD ticks all the boxes required for backups? Tape is poop.

Priced out of market

Tape might be $15 for 72GB but what about the drives? A quick Google ("tape backup") fetches back Shopping results of £690.76, £590,04, £1150.33 - haha, yeah right, when I can buy a DVD writer for £28 and DVDs for 35p each (Maplin) or less (10p at Ebuyer).

I'd be happy to use tape backup at home *if* I could get a drive for £30-£40 plus £12/72GB per 72G of tape (providing that's not "only if you buy a gazillion petabytes of the stuff at once, i.e. minimum spend £12million"), but no such solutions exist. They're priced at deep-pocketed businesses with a "tape is the only backup option" policy, which is a rapidly shrinking market.

Tape backup people need to get a real world head on and price themselves back into the market if they want a future.