Computer tape drives coming back to the computers of 2012.

Computer tape drives were all the rage in the early days of computing, with computer tape drives able to store massive amounts of data these days. The early computers used tape to store computer programs and information on reel to reel tapes that were on giant reels that were threaded on and then read at high speed to retrieve data. The only problem is the seek time is very long as the tape has to be wound to the right section to begin reading the data from the tape that the user has requested. Modern tape drives can fit 8 Tera-bytes of data enabling data backup of modern hard disks onto a single tape. The tapes are able to store massive amounts of data with compression and are getting faster as well as cheaper. Of course it is not the be all and end all of backup, if you are backing up data, then you should back up your data in more than one place. Those 100 Megabyte Iomega Zip drives are also a good backup solution, we now have cheap 16 Gigabyte USB thumb drives, they are sometimes not that reliable, especially the ones from Aldi, but a good brand will last you longer.

If there is a reliable, cheap 8 Terabyte tape drive that is fast and reliable, then that would be a worthwhile backup solution for safekeeping the data off a modern high-capacity hard disk and ensuring the long-term safety of the data. With modern technology it is a matter of course that the tape technology would become more and more reliable and faster. The transfer rates are high with modern tape hardware and this is necessary with the huge amounts of data that will be transferred.

http://www.google.com/products/catalog?q=computer+tape+drives+8+TB&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=shop&cid=899907182980328714&sa=X&ei=e3N1T638JeK5iQe3_smFDw&ved=0CG0Q8wIwAA. This tape auto-loader rack-mount device has up to 24 Terabytes of storage whilst only taking up a single rack space. Backup on Linux is very simple using a script to concatenate and compress files in a folder into a tar.gz file that is then copied to an external backup drive. My backup script that I wrote in Perl is a good way to backup your Linux system. http://www.securitronlinux.com/uncategorized/viewing-crontab-and-a-backup-script/. There is also some useful software here for backing up your Linux computer to an external drive. This is the main strength of the Linux platform, the ease of backup using various tools and scripts to ensure the safety and security of your data.