Online Data Storage or Tape Backup - What’s better?

Backing up data is a widely followed norm and has almost become a necessity in industries today. Since the last 60 years Tape has been the widely chosen option for taking backups of high value data. It is relatively cheaper, does not have heating or cooling requirements like disks, can last easily up to 30 years, is portable and data can be encrypted on it. But nowadays, Cloud has started to offer better online backup solutions enabling usage of multiple copies of data at diverse locations and provide advanced search options due to well indexed data.

We can compare the two tools for off site storage of media in the following ways:

1. Cost: For tapes, the cost is usually high for large data volumes with an additional hardware maintenance cost. On the other hand, there is an ongoing monthly operating fee for cloud storage and as your data volumes increase, the per GB cost reduces.

2. Maintenance: Engineers are required to design, manage and maintain tape backup processes and recover data while management of online data backup processes can be simplified to the user level.

3. Data Security: Tapes can be lost, stolen or damaged even in the most protected of environments whereas two copies of your data is stored online in an encrypted format in safe data centres.

4. Reliability: Tapes are usually weakly built and can suffer from reliability issues. With imaging services providers in mumbai and cloud backup services providers in other such cities, data is encrypted and stored in remote servers so there is no risk of files being corrupted or lost in transfer or storage.

5. Ease of Use: Tapes are a more labor intensive form of data backup as the tapes have to be manually configured and is time consuming. With an online backup solution, the backup is taken via an internet connection and it is usually automated hence it automatically goes on in the background.

Cloud archiving provides a framework in which data can be stored and retrieved along with additional features of security and compliance. Today most companies use both tape media backup and online cloud backup, tape for monthly data storage while the online one is used for daily data backup.