our local sox admin tell us tape is still fine..
we have several international sites, and fully backup our server equipment along with data from over 5000+ users on standard dlt's and he doesn't have a problem with it so I'm wondering what it is that your local SOX or HIPAA auditor would have a problem with.
Tape works great, easy to use, supported by industry leading software provided by vendors like Veritas, easy to bring offsite and is only usable by the hardware it's intended for (tape drives).
External usb hdd storage solutions are gaining popularity and coming down in price but harddrives are more prone to failures than tapes ever would be. Not everyone uses efs encryption (although they should be if using this backup method) and in the case of a damaged harddrive, cost for retrieving data could be thousands of dollars per harddrive and with no guarantee of total data recovery.
Tape isn't that expensive to replace, isn't prone to failure nearly as much as harddrives are and are easily portable which makes them great for offsite storage.
I still have dlt's from 98 that have data on them that I can access. How many harddrives do you have that are 8 years old and still functional? How many harddrives from 8 years ago provided the same storage capacity as standard dlt's did from that time period. Harddrives have only recently caught up to the same storage limits and again being such a complex piece of hardware is prone to failure. I have never had one tape fail on me in the past 8 years, I have however seen too many harddrive failures on desktops, laptops & servers (thankfully we had tape backups).
DVD media is extremely portable but provides nowhere near the required storage capacity to be viable for big business. Small businesses could probably get away with using DVD as their backup media but that would probably be only practical for very small businesses, it's really only practical for home pc users and even then with the advent of bigger drives comes the requirement for media that can hold more, even dvd media is losing ground here.
George, you sound very adamantly against tape backup? Any reason why? I'd be interested in finding out what backup solution is currently used by TR and how long you've been using it, if you have any alternate backup solutions in place on top of that, etc.
