Software got better. Compression, deduplication, pure incremental backups (single level zero) , reverse diffs, etc all make random access read/write backups ch

Software got better. Compression, deduplication, pure incremental backups (single level zero) , reverse diffs, etc all make random access read/write backups cheaper and more attractive. I've heard it speculated that glacier's slow restore times is consistent with a large number of optical disks and robots for loading. Never heard it substantiated though.