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People don’t understand the reliability of tape. I would never trust a hard drive for archival storage. Also, offline backups are an amazing insurance against ransomware. Just let a company like IronMountain pick up the tapes, it works well.

However it feels irrelevant for a company who exclusively operates in the cloud.

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On the other hand, in anecdote land, in 1.5 decades of use, I never had a tape successfully restore without some kind of failure, corruption or other problem.

Tapes can burn. Give me multi-location online/nearline disk storage any day.

both. always both.

We had nearlines that were basically archive targets, that stored about 6months to a years worth of versioned data. We also dumped to tape at the same time (one for data interchange with other companies, and one for our actual backup)

WE arse saved multiple times from both tape fuckery (mostly the robot being sad) and nearlines going whoopsey (they had reduced redundancy, and a whole bunch more nodes to allow for the size)

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