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In this blog post, Raymond Chen makes a reference to files being on a tape archive. Are tape archives still supported by windows and/or used?

RCIX
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  • I do not know anybody who runs server with Windows, but tapes are still up to date. The price per byte is a popular argument, but LTO for example can be stored 30 years and is good for archives. Modern drives support hardware AES encryption and compression. – Jonas Stein Aug 27 '15 at 12:04

2 Answers2

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The Windows Server Backup software that comes with Windows Server 2008 no longer supports backup to tape.

However, there are plenty of third party backup tools for Windows which still support tape. For large volumes of data I don't there's an obvious competitor for tape yet. Something like LTO which can store 800GB a tape combined with an automated tape library can easily provide huge quantities of backup storage.

Tapes are also more convenient than HDDs for off-site storage.

sleske
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David Webb
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  • Are you sure? because you can get terabyte size hard drives for pretty cheap nowadays... – RCIX Oct 06 '09 at 09:09
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    For large organisations with 1,000s of servers backing up over a dedicated network to a central backup service, storing months of backups, 1TB isn't all that much. That's what I meant by "large volumes of data". – David Webb Oct 06 '09 at 09:14
  • SO we're talking 10s of terabytes to petabytes then? that makes sense i suppose. – RCIX Oct 06 '09 at 09:21
  • I think for a backup of a single server a tape doesn't make as much sense as it once did - which might have been what you were asking. But tapes are still used pretty widely for larger requirements. – David Webb Oct 06 '09 at 09:46
  • Tape archives aren't going away any time soon - but it's being supplemented by *very* large disk-arrays for disk-based backup. The Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape (D2D2T) solutions offered by many vendors are the solution for larger companies. You get all the benefits of tape archives for long-term storage, and all the benefits of multi-version, quick restore times of disk-based backup, AND you get the 24/7 backup window! ;-) – tplive Oct 06 '09 at 11:39
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    Dave Webb, you should also be clearer on one point - Windows Server 2008 still supports tape-drivers, thus _you can backup to tape_ but you need a third-party app! But, the *Windows Backup application* doesn't support tape-backup any longer.. – tplive Oct 06 '09 at 11:43
  • I edited the answer to make it clear that it's only Windows Server Backup which no longer supports tape, not the OS itself. – sleske May 30 '11 at 15:59
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The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of CERN is a good illustration of what large amounts of data means: according to that article they expected to collect 15 PiB of data per year that it is operational. And that's only the raw data registered during experiments with the LHC, not interpreted data generated with software by scientists trying to do something useful with it.

They have all this data on a distributed storage system based on hard disks (you can compare it with something like Amazon S3, but they built their own "cloud storage"), but the backups are on tape, simply because that's cheaper.

JanC
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