Advantages of Tape Drives As Your Data Backup Media
A lot of companies choose tape drives to have a backup of their mission critical data. It amounts to nearly 80 per cent of the worldwide digital data that is currently being stored on tape media. Below is given the reasons that further enumerate the advantages of such a practice.
Backup Data Online
Though a random access to a data is not possible with tapes, it cannot be counted as a major disadvantage. Rather, the data transfer speeds on tape media are as higher as 80 megabyte per second.
Tapes also offer a great amount of space for storage. No matter whether you want to store just a few megabytes or some whooping 800 gigabytes of uncompressed data, tapes provide you with enough storage options. More to this, if you can compress the data, there will be more space available in them. Thanks to such a variation, tape drives are sufficient to store any data that you might require in the future.
Tape drives also ensure a great compressing ratio. This means that you can actually cut down the original size of the data by quite a few extents.
Also there has been a lot of improvement in tape media formats. Since its introduction way back in 1951, the technological advancements have helped tapes much so that they do not just fall behind.
The cost associated with deploying and operating a data tape also commends much importance. They are cost efficient when compared to all other back up storage facilities currently available in the market. This makes them quite affordable to the small business units that though require back up facilities for their data, cannot bear the huge cost associated with availing the same.
Tape drives also come with a library system that enables better data organization structure. Furthermore, the software that is designed to facilitate this has also seen much improvement all through these years.
The question of storing your mission critical data in a reliable manner is also rightly answered by tape drives. Though not like hard disc drives, tapes can also be used to store data for a longer period of time.
The latest versions of tape drives also come with WORM (Write Once Read Many) technologies that ensure a greater security of the data you store in tapes. Facilities like encryption and limiting the access of the tape’s content to a particular geographical location are also available.
The Last Word
The market share of tapes are also expected to rise sharply as latest technologies are being introduced that can help a tape to store data up to 2 terabytes. All these advantages clearly demonstrate the preference of tapes to use as a backup facility of data.