Western Digital Formats Hard Disk Drive Factory as Demand Spins Down

THRESHIN said:
You're right, I don't backup that much data every weekend. Neither do most home users.

You forgot to factor in something rather important when comparing prices. The cost of the tape drive itself. Currently, cheapest one I can find on Amazon is about $2600 CAD.

That buys a lot of HDDs. This might just be why tape drives have been reserved for business/enterprise purposes.

I'm not too sure where you're going with this other than 'you're wrong! Tape is cheaper!'
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For home use, or a small business with 1-2 servers, I'd agree that backing up to disks is cheaper, and a better option.
I backup my home systems to a small NAS and then backup the NAS to a couple large SATA drives in a dock that I store off-site.
As long as your backup fits on a single external drive, and you keep at least 2 separate backups, it's fine. I'd recommend at least 3 backup drives (2 off site & 1 connected to the server for business)
I've seen too many external drives fail due to the heavy load backups place on them to trust them too much.

Plus, I'm just tired of all the people saying tape is dead or too expensive.
It's really the best solution for large multi server backups, or in cases where you need to keep numerous backups in case they are needed.

As for the price of a tape drive, if a business is backing up 40TB+ of data, they are likely using a tape changer, so you can double or triple that price :eek:
However, since the cost per TB of tape storage is much less, even buying an expensive drive & changer will be cheaper if you have enough TB's of backups stored off-site.
Having the tapes barcoded (you can buy preprinted labels) makes tape handling much easier.
At my remote office, the software automatically sends an email of which tapes need to be taken off-site and which need to be returned to the changer. That way I don't need a backup expert on site to swap tapes.
 
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