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Tapes are only good for offline storage. If you want online storage, you'll need one drive per tape, and you would get huge lookup times.

• paulmd 8y ago
  > Tapes are only good for offline storage. > If you want online storage, you'll need one drive per tape, No, tape libraries exist, and would be considered 'nearline' storage. https://www.ibm.com/it-infrastructure/storage/tape/library https://www.ibm.com/it-infrastructure/storage/tape/library > and you would get huge lookup times Yes. This is not a good system for random access.
  • progval 8y ago
    Indeed. But the initial investment is very expensive.
    • paulmd 8y ago
      It depends on your financial scale. A fancy tape library, sure, but if your company is in-sourcing hundreds of TBs of backups surely you are not destitute. Glacier is always cheaper. On the other hand I paid $185 for a LTO-5 drive a year or two ago (no library, manually operated). 1.5 TB on a $20 tape is still pretty good in my book.