Agreed you need someone dedicated a minimum 1/2 to full headcount to run a backup tape backup system - particularly the first six months when you are getting al

Agreed you need someone dedicated a minimum 1/2 to full headcount to run a backup tape backup system - particularly the first six months when you are getting all your routines in place (if can drop down to a minimum 8-10 hour/week time commitment once things are running smoothly - but obvious can scale up to many many headcount if you have a lot of data and a lot of systems being backed up). You purchase a Tape Library with sufficient drives / slots to support your data volume, you decide on tape software, you set up a pickup schedule with Iron Mountain or whoever will pick up (and return) your tapes, set up up your schedule of fulls / diffs rotation. There are three tricky and time consuming elements that require a lot of knowledge and dedicated time - #1 making sure you have a consistent snapshot and backup of the snapshots and RESTORE process for all your systems. Someone needs to test/verify roughly quarterly test restores (very time consuming and annoying but critical). And, the one thing that very few people do, but is also important - doing a “Black Start” - in which your primary backup site (with the robot, and software, and systems) are lost and you have to bootstrap, from scratch everything. So, yeah - virtual tape library, while obviously having downsides, is massively useful for a small enterprise.