Damn, the last time I thought about this (20 years ago) I was able to buy a tape drive for a PC for like ........ I wanna say $250-300?? I forget the format, it was very very common though and tapes were dirt cheap, maybe $10-12 a pop. Worked great, if you were willing to sit around and swap tapes out as needed.

So tape doesn't make sense for the typical person, unless you don't have to buy the equipment and store i.

But, if you're even a small company it becomes cheaper to use tape.

Companies don't like deleting data. Ever. In fact some industries have laws that say they can't delete data.

For example, the company I work in is small, but old. Our accounting department alone requires complex automated processes to do things each day that require data to be backed up.

From the beginning of time. I shit you not. There is no compression even.

And at the drop of a hat, the IT dept needs to be able to implement a backup from any time in the past. Although this almost never happens outside of the current pay cycle, they need to have the option available.

The best way they have to facilitate this (I hate it - like I said they're old) is to simply write everything multiple times a night. And it's everything since we started using digital storage. Yes, it's overkill and makes no sense, but that's the way it is for us. And that's the way it is for a lot of companies.

So, when we're talking about that amount of data, and tape having a storage cost advantage of 4:1 over disk, it more than pays for all the overhead for enterprise level backups.

Yes, tape has very steep entry costs and requires maintenance and storage.

Most of the time it doesn't make sense for a person to use it, but rather a corporate entity that needs to backup petabytes of data multiple times a day.