Tape drives Vs. Cloud Storage – which is the best option for you?

You’ve got the memo – you need to back-up your important and valuable data on a regular/daily/constant basis. Without it, your business could suffer irreparable damage. You need to protect you and your business from everything, whether that is freak nature events or intentional acts of sabotage and terrorism.

With such a long list of possible catastrophic events to shield your business from, it can be difficult to know whether investing in tape drives is the best option or whether to place your faith in cloud storage.

In some ways, the answer may be simple, in other ways it is not. And so, in your wrestling of the technological solutions that are best fit, let us look at what each will offer:

Tape drives

You may have thought tape died out along with the Sunday night chart show on Radio 1 but it is not only still available, as a medium for backing-up data it is the favoured choice of many. And here’s why:

• Capacity is simply gargantuan – of all the materials, and of all the technology available today, tape still has it in terms of capacity. Well-known brands are constantly evolving tape so that it has the ability to store more and more information and complex data.
• Cost-effective – cheap is not the right word to use here as people think that this means the quality is poor. It isn’t. It is however, a cost-effective investment of both your cash and time that once installed and in use, takes virtually nothing to carry on running it.
• Stand-alone – you don’t need to rely on an internet connection or anything similar which means that tape storage is not at the mercy of hackers and/or viruses. As long as the tapes are clean, stored and used in a temperate place then you will have no issues of this nature. This way, people feel that it is more secure.
• Compatible – it may be old but it doesn’t mean that it is obsolete. And this is something that many businesses enjoy about tape drives and tape itself. There is a compatibility that makes it easy to introduce more tape and more tape drives. Tape libraries, for example, are pieces of kit that can swap between one tape drive and another, saving you the time and energy swapping tapes over etc.

It is a great way for business to store and back-up data as tape drives also grow with your business. This is often a common complaint and concern thus, when it comes to other kinds of technology such as hard drives, some businesses feel they have the buy the biggest capacity solution that they can.

However, there can be some issues that people feel makes tape drive an obsolete technology for their business. But before you toss it completely, we suggest you consider that Google, arguably the most powerful and largest search engine in the world, use tape to back up the data from its email users…

Cloud services

A relatively new kid on the block is the provision of your own personal cloud, floating in the unseen and rather mysterious ether that is the Internet.

Rather than physically storing your data and being able to take it home with you, you are trusting your data to a place that cannot be seen, touched and in all reality, physically located their location is so top secret.

There are some pros to this solution:

• You pay for what you use – wouldn’t it be refreshing if everything was still pay as you go? Some cloud service providers so exactly this and thus, when you need it, you buy some more storage space, a bit like building your house, brick by brick.
• Safe – some people say it is the only real way of keeping your data safe and this may or may not be true…
• Access – no matter where you are in the world, you can access your data.

There are some cons that people who favor tape drives will suggest are too big a leap of faith to make:

• Breaches – with the online world full of hackers and viruses, malicious acts are not uncommon and cloud service providers are constantly under attack or threat of attack. They may successfully ward these attacks off on 99% of occasions but it only takes that one chink for data to be lost, mis-used, corrupted and so on.
• Internet connection – you may be on the outer fringes of Siberia, it may be beautiful but does it have the secure, safe, reliable and fast internet connection you need to access your information?
• Who can see this information and why? – there are many other reasons why many people are not so keen on trusting their data to the cloud, either. Not ones for conspiracy theories, sometimes it is not always the bad guys who want to know what you are doing…
• Cost – it may be only a monthly cost but as your usage grows, so will this cost. With tape, you can re-use the medium over and over again several times before you need to replace it – and this will not be on a monthly basis, so much gentler on your budget, don’t you think?

So, which one do you think is right for you?