I write an editorial about why I thought tape still had a place in backups. There were some interesting responses that said disk works well for them and they wouldn’t go back to tape.

I used to think the density was a big deal, along with cost, but maybe that’s changing. It’s interesting to think about disk only backups remotely, using a pull technique of some sort.

There are likely good ways to do this, but I still struggle with the offsite aspect of this. How do you get backups offsite in a timely manner. You can burn a lot of bandwidth with disks. If you physically move disks, even those large portable ones, isn’t that more cumbersome than tape? Can you have a service like an Iron Mountain still handle backups?

SQL Server does a great job of handling backups and restores, but you have to be able to mange the files well. Tape is less durable over time, though the same might be said of disk. In most cases, you never use either set of backups, so beyond a few days, does it matter? The case I wrote about shows it can.

I’m not convinced that disk is better, but I can at least see some places where it can work. Not tremendously large amounts of data, the need for a hot standby somewhere, and perhaps many cases where you would never want to go back more than a few versions.