My immediate thought is to look to the cloud. Instead of writing to tape and physically transporting the tape, write to cloud storage (AWS or Amazon) and then download from there. I'd still roughly follow what you're doing now, complete the backup locally and then copy to the cloud. However, I'd use that instead of tape. While I'm sure the cloud transfer of that much data won't be fast, it'll probably be faster than what you have currently. You can also speed it up. Using something AZCopy for moving the file to Azure storage streams the move, making the process very fast indeed.