You don't need Veeam of course but you should definitely try it out if you really want to manage your backups properly. It works really well and is pretty sleek

You don't need Veeam of course but you should definitely try it out if you really want to manage your backups properly. It works really well and is pretty sleek, also for restore processs and when working with VMs or endpoints. You should certainly use it instead of any other commercial backup software like BackupExec (most of which are just... bad in comparison). Veeam offers a free Windows agent but I don't think that one works with tape drives (I might be wrong, especially in combination with LTFS, see below). You can't generally use tape like a USB stick, that is, write and delete files to and from it willy-nilly ;-) As tape is linear, that would require a lot of going back and forth. Imagine random I/O when you can just go forward or backward with the read head: That's annoying and slow at best, at worst it could destroy the tape or machine quickly. HOWEVER: They have come up with something called the "Linear Tape File System" (LTFS) which does in fact allow you to access a tape in a way that looks (from the outside at least) pretty similar to any external storage device. In fact, sustained read speeds can be much faster even than traditional storage in the right circumstances. There are some tricks they use, obviously, to get around the physical limitations I mentioned above. One of them is, I believe, that space is not freed up if you delete a file (it is simply marked as deleted in meta data - but that's the "modern way" to delete things anyway, right? :-D). Also, your drive has to support it and the tape also has to be formatted in a specific way. It might only work with new tapes (again, I might be wrong or this may have changed). I've actually never used LTFS in production, so I can't help you with the details or tell you what this means for the lifespan of the tape if you use it in this fashion. I also don't know what software you need to use this under Linux. Feel free to report back if you go down this route, I'd be curious to hear whether you get it to work and whether you like it for everyday use.