Using tape for backing up data that doesn’t need to be accessed at a moments notice is a great solution so long as your data sets are large enough to justify the high cost of the drives themselves. If you are backing up about 200Tb or less it’s cheaper to build a hard drive array but above that the cost per terabyte for tapes surpasses hard drives and makes a lot of sense. Although I hear managing tape libraries are a pain with how frequently they jam while swapping tapes.
I really wish they made data tapes the size of normal compact audio cassettes using modern technology.
A cassette sized backup would be so easy to store, with a big caveat on how much the drive itself would cost
Who knows, we may yet see them. I couldn’t find the exact article or video but it was saying how there’s a lot of R&D that can still go into tape drives to make storage more dense. We may yet see SSD sized tape drives!
