Re: Long live tape !
Tape is on the way out.
The more sensitive it gets, i.e. the more data it holds, the harder it is to maintain properly. Because it's a mechanical, moving-part, friction-based item, it can't hold up against constant use, and the more you cram on it, the worse it gets.
Off-line backups and archives are also not exclusively the domain of tape. You could easily disconnect and power off other backup devices too, and they will retain data without power for decades. Hell, nowadays, they are talking about persistent RAM that can do the same while still working at RAM speeds.
Tape, though, will always suffer from problems with regards replacement equipment. Though you might have the tape in ten years time, the cost of the drive to read it becomes prohibitive quickly. Given that it's supposed to be your insurance against disaster, having to source another compatible tape drive rapidly, installing the software, restoring from the tape, etc. can take DAYS. Other storage devices are inherently easier to read from, almost being entirely self-contained units, so the need for additional, specialist, mechanical equipment isn't there and you can restore from them in HOURS.
I don't see a future for tape at all. We are already at multi-terabyte SSD. There's no reason that some electronic memory (be it memristors, SSD, Flash or a variety of other technologies, even traditional hard drives) won't take over from tape entirely. Same amount of data, contained in the same space as a tape, no additional "reader" required, data retention into the decades without specialised handling, built-in error correction if you were making archive-quality stuff, if you go solid-state it's impervious to shock, temperature variation, etc. and you could even make it waterproof (handy in a fire scenario, for instance).
Calibrating little slivers of tape in a dusty atmosphere, across a specialised mechanical head and then spinning the tape at high speed, in a little plastic box that you expect people to carry with them without exposing it to the outside air, that's a fragile technology.
As it is, I've worked in several places over the last few decades where tape is at best a second-class citizen, playing only a minor role compared to networked storage, offline traditional hard drives, replication, etc. Though some of that is vulnerable to your theoretical network attack, there's no reason that it can't be disconnected, snapshotted, restricted access (i.e. push backups rather than pull), etc. to remove that threat.
I've been in IT for nearly 20 years. In that time - excluding test restores - I have never once been required to restore from tape, mainly because I specify lots of "cheap, fast, let's not put all our eggs in one basket, if this doesn't work we DO have other backups, but this is quick" backup storage. Sure, a USB drive stuck on a server on its own is not "a backup system" (BTW: I'm not claiming it's a good idea!). But you'll be glad of it when you only want the one file that was deleted last week and not have to go to your tape catalog to retrieve it. I've recovered data from short-term backups like NAS and connected drives, DFS mirrors, remote replicas etc. infinitely more than I ever have from tape.
I'm sure in large datacentres, etc. the regime is different but whereas every small business used to have a server with a tape drive in it (often costing almost as much as the server itself), nowadays everything from cloud-backup to network storage to VM replication to a redundant site to just plain "Lots of copies of everything everywhere on all kinds of devices" has taken over. I can easily carry a small NAS home with several copies of my entire workplace's VM's and data, for example. Encrypted, full-disk-speed, historical snapshots, network-accessible in an emergency, hell, I could even turn on the iSCSI option and run all the VM's direct from the device in a pinch.
Tape doesn't really have much of a future except in specialist scenarios. Those places are already into the hundreds of thousands with library robots and so on. But even they won't stay there forever.
I know that if I was suddenly made a billionaire, and could set up a company the way I wanted, tape wouldn't figure heavily. Lots of copies. Lots of snapshots. Lots of devices. Lots of locations. Lots of technologies. Redundancy in EVERYTHING. Tape would only figure as one of those as an equal partner to the others at best, for such technological redundancy, not because it offers any particular advantages. As far as advantages goes, it would actually be the bottom of the pile.
(P.S. I have never lost a byte. Not one. I specialising in recovering schools that have experienced previous disasters and sanitising their systems).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
