A tape drive is a device that reads and writes data on a magnetic tape. Magnetic tape data storage is typically used for offline, archival data storage. Tape media generally has a favorable unit cost and long archival stability.
A tape drive provides sequential access storage, unlike a disk drive, which provides random access storage. A disk drive can move to any position on the disk in a few milliseconds, but a tape drive must physically wind tape between reels to read any one particular piece of data. As a result, tape drives have very slow average seek times to data. However, tape drives can stream very quickly off the tape when it hits the right position. A data recovery service in Jacksonville Florida specializes in these tape devices and the recovery from them once damaged or inaccessible.
In IT departments, tape backup is the ability to periodically copy the contents of all or a designated amount of data from its usual storage device to a tape cartridge device so that, in the event of a hard disk crash or comparable failure, the data will not be lost. The Jacksonville data recovery service provides these extraction on both old legacy tapes such as a DLT1 or LTO3, as well as some of the most recent tape sizes and formatts such as a LTO-8 as example.
Tape backup systems exist for needs ranging from backing up the hard disk on a personal computer to backing up large amounts of storage for archiving and disaster recovery purposes in a large enterprise as part of a storage area network, usually combining a hardware and software package.
For personal computer tape backup, the Onstream USB tape drive is popular. For enterprise tape backup, Linear Tape Open is an industry open standard from Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Seagate. Tape backup also includes the ability to restore that has been backed up back to hard disk storage devices when needed.
Tape backup is giving way to disk as a backup target, but tape still has numerous benefits that mean it is likely to be with us for a long time yet. While disk is less fussy about the throughput of your backup systems and is superb at rapid restores it is still more expensive as a medium than tape. Meanwhile, tape is cheap and boasts incredible write speeds.
