alt Hacker NewsPerhaps? But unless tape, and the infrastructure to support it, is dramatically cheaper than disk, they might still be better served by more disk - having two or more copies of data on disk means that both of them can service load, whereas a tape backup is only passively useful as a backup.
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stonogo • 01/16/2026
This turns out to be the case, with the cost difference growing as the archive size scales. Once you hit petascale, it's not even close. However, most large-scale tape deployments also have disk involved, so it's usually not one or the other.
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EvanAnderson • 01/16/2026
A lot of people, me included, consider anything online not to be backup. Being disconnected and completely at-rest is a very desirable property.
Melatonic • 01/16/2026
That's exactly what it is.
You also don't want your true backups online at all - that's the whole point.