Well, as a backup, USB drives don't have that great of a lifespan compared to tapes. They're also not nearly as space dense or competitive for $/GB once you've

Well, as a backup, USB drives don't have that great of a lifespan compared to tapes. They're also not nearly as space dense or competitive for $/GB once you've amortized the drives. And for an org, there's still attacks in both cases. Do your backups get requested through an automated system? Well you've just made a very slow tape library with people rather than robotics. Are the tapes/USB sticks encrypted and the encryption keys stored in an online system? Then the hackers have a mechanism to deny you access to the contents of the tapes, which is probably their goal anyway. Yes a USB drive with a text file is pretty safe from such attacks, but it also doesn't scale to the backup concerns of even relatively small orgs.