About 10 years ago I remember hearing that tape drives were still in use in some places for nightly, full disk backups. They’re apparently cheap and quite fast for backup up or restoring a large batch of data all at once.
About 10 years ago I remember hearing that tape drives were still in use in some places for nightly, full disk backups. They’re apparently cheap and quite fast for backup up or restoring a large batch of data all at once.
Yes tape drives still exist and I have used modern ones, but they are plagued with problems. The tapes expensive for their limited lifetime. The drivers and software are a nightmare. They're just not worth it for non-business use.
StorageTek (now part of Oracle) makes Enterprise level tape systems that store exabytes of data. They're used for near-line and cold storage data you don't need very often.