Tape is awesome. Relatively inexpensive at scale, huge storage volumes, consumes almost no power compared to what it stores. But it has its time and place. That place is archival and long-term offsite backups that are very infrequently accessed. People aren’t using it for what it’s best at doing.

The backup/archive software I use for work is enterprise grade - Tivoli Storage Manager a.k.a. Spectrum Protect. In my office, I use Time Machine on the Macs, and simply ‘tar’ on Linux to back up specific important directories. Windows machines are backed up by their owners with various tools that I don’t tend to concern myself with.

For the enterprise stuff, what makes it great is that it gives you a huge amount of control and flexibility and storage options. I love the idea of TSM/SP’s ‘incremental forever’ backup methodology. It means you can roll back to any backup at any point in time, as long as you’re storing enough historical versions of the files. The device support is also amazing, and I’ve built systems that can scale to be petabytes large with it.

For my office, I just use what I know is built in and reliable. I know every Linux system has tar, and every Mac has Time Machine. For my NAS device, I make copies of it with rsync to a USB-SATA enclosure with 5 drives, usually every 90 days or so, less if I’ve made a lot of changes.