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Backup Media

It became necessary to backup data from the moment first computer appeared. Data corruption or data loss is one of the problems that any home or enterprise software product or solution need to solve. That is why backup media industry has a long and successful history and many different storage mechanisms were developed.


Cloud backup is quite popular now since high speed internet is widely available and server storage cost is relatively cheap. Storing data in the cloud solves many problems for customers since there is no need to buy and manage backup storage. All that is typically needed for cloud backup is a high-performance internet connection and a software package which will manage backup locations and schedule. Cloud backups are used on regular basis by many mobile users to backup photos and videos to the cloud in order to save storage space on a device and make data safely stored and available for later use.


Magnetic tape backup is the oldest method of storing backup information. At the dawn of the computers it was used as a primary storage device. But with introduction of floppy and hard drives which had quicker access and transfer rates it slowly disappeared from personal computers and servers and found a new niche in backup solutions. Due to its long shelf life and high write and read speed magnetic tape is an optimal solution for long term data backup. Typical magnetic tape backup shelf life is 10 to 20 years and in some cases even up to 30 years. This shines in comparison with hard drives and optical disks which typically fail in 3 to 5 years.


Optical backup uses optical disks like CD, DVD or Blu-Ray to store backup information. Due to the fragility of the optical media it is not typically used in enterprise solutions to backup data. It could be used to backup some local data or for personal computer data backup purposes.

Flash and SSD

While flash and SSD media provide fast read and write performance they are typically not the media of choice for backups because of the high cost and relatively high chance of hardware failure. SSD are also relatively new to the storage market and more data is needed to asses viability of SSDs for long-term backups.