Tape drive storage has been so prevalent in the industry that the tar
command (the most commonly used command for archiving) is derived from
the words tape archive. Capacities and durability of tapes vary from type to
type and range from a few gigabytes to hundreds of gigabytes, with
commensurate increases in cost for the equipment and media. Autoloading
tape-drive systems can accommodate archives that exceed the capacity of the
file systems.
TIP
Older tape equipment is often available in the used equipment market and
might be useful for smaller operations that have outgrown more limited
backup device options.Tape equipment is well supported in Linux and, when properly maintained, is
extremely reliable. The tapes themselves are inexpensive, given their storage
capacity and the ability to reuse them. Be aware, however, that tapes do
deteriorate over time and, being mechanical, tape drives can and will fail.
CAUTION
Neglecting to clean, align, and maintain tape drives puts your data at risk.
The tapes themselves are also susceptible to mechanical wear and
degradation. Hardware maintenance is part of a good backup policy. Do not
ever forget that it is a question of when—not if—hardware will fail.Cloud Storage
Services such as Dropbox and Amazon’s AWS and S3 offer a way to create
and store backups offsite. Larger companies may create their own offsite,
online storage options as well. In each of these and similar cases, data is
copied and stored remotely on a file server set aside specifically for that
purpose. The data backups may be scheduled with great flexibility and
according to the plans and desires of the customer.
Cloud storage is a backup solution that is recent and growing in popularity,
but it is also a technology that is changing rapidly. To learn more about the
options mentioned here, take a look at www.dropbox.com and
[http://aws.amazon.com/s3/. Although these are not the only services of the](http://aws.amazon.com/s3/. Although these are not the only services of the)
kind available, they offer a good introduction to the concept. If you like to roll
your own, you definitely want to take a look at Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud at
http://www.ubuntu.com/cloud.