Tape Cartridge Backup -- does it still work in W7

Hi all.

This might seem a bit of a dinosaur technology question but some businesses still rely on TAPE cartridges for backup.

I know you can get 1 TB usb disks which are probably MANY times cheaper than a decent tape subsystem - to say nothing of the cartridges themselves - however a lot of businesses still use tape.

I haven't seen anywhere a discussion about whether tapes still work.

Note - Professional tape sub systems - sometimes with "Robot" like mechanisms for selecting the correct volumes - not rubbishy consumer QIC like systems.

Without decent backup capability at a corporate network level then W7 / W8 server will be a no go.

Cheers
jimbo

Hey jimbo, here is a Technet post that might help you. Good Luck. :)

Yes, tape systems will work and are still in use today. Most of these systems in use by business are often fiber attached tape drives in a robot which are connected to a centralized backup server. These servers often run software like Legato, Tivoli, Veritas NetBackup, etc. You typically just load agents on the workstations and servers and back them up across the network.

A lot of businesses have moved to disk staging systems..so the backups first dump the data to disk, but then once on the secondary storage they are backed up to tape. Tapes are still used because
1). companies need to keep backups legally on an ongoing basis
2). backups need to be stored offsite in the event of a disaster