Why migrate my data to tape?
In use since the earliest days of computing, magnetic tapes are still widely used in data storage. Outdated in appearance, but far from obsolete, they far outclass HDDs and SSDs as mass storage devices.
Despite their low reading speed and the impossibility of simultaneous writing operations, the advantages of magnetic tapes lie in their other characteristics:
- very high storage capacity: by 2022 there will be prototypes with a capacity of 580TB, compared with 8TB for SSDs and 12TB for HDDs;
- Long service life: LTOs have a service life of 30 years without data degradation, compared with 5 years for HDDs;
- lower financial cost per gigabyte and lower operating costs than other information storage media;
- removable cassettes: easy to relocate, store and secure by air gap, physically isolating them from the computer network.
These characteristics make magnetic tapes particularly well-suited:
- data transfer or migration procedures;
- long-term data storage and archiving ;
- full or incremental backup operations.
