Tape vs disk vs cloud

For data you keep long-term but rarely read, yes — usually by a wide margin. Cloud archive tiers charge a monthly fee per TB that compounds for years, plus egress/retrieval charges when you actually need the data. Tape is a low one-off £/TB, idle cartridges cost nothing to keep, and restores have no egress. Over a typical 5–10 year retention, tape’s total cost is a fraction of cloud for cold data. Cloud can still win for small volumes or short retention where you value zero hardware.

Use all three — they solve different problems. Disk (ideally deduplicating, like HPE StoreOnce) is your fast backup/restore landing zone for daily operational recovery. Tape is the cheap, air-gapped, immutable long-term archive — your ransomware safety net. Cloud is convenient off-site copy and elastic DR. A modern 3-2-1-1-0 design typically backs up to disk, copies long-term/locked points to tape, and replicates a copy off-site (tape vault or cloud).

A tape out of the drive is physically offline — there is no network path for malware or a compromised account to reach it. Cloud copies are online by default and, unless immutability is correctly configured and the account is well secured, can be encrypted or deleted by an attacker who gains access. Tape’s air-gap is inherent, not a setting you can misconfigure.

For a single small file, disk is faster because tape is sequential and must locate and load a cartridge. But for large sequential restores (whole datasets, DR rebuilds) modern LTO-9 streams up to 400 MB/s per drive and libraries run many drives in parallel, so bulk restores are fast. The design answer is to keep recent recovery points on disk for instant restore and use tape for the long-term/air-gapped copy.

Egress fees are what cloud providers charge to move data out of their platform — including when you restore from a backup or archive tier. For a large recovery they can be substantial and unpredictable, and archive tiers add retrieval charges and delays on top. Tape and on-prem disk have no egress: once it’s yours, reading it back is free.

Yes — a common hybrid is: back up to on-prem deduplicating disk for fast restore, copy to tape for the air-gapped long-term archive, and replicate a copy to cloud for off-site DR. Your backup software (Veeam, Commvault, NetBackup, etc.) orchestrates the lifecycle so each tier holds the right data for the right cost.

We assess your data volumes, RPO/RTO, retention and compliance needs, then design the tier mix — disk landing zone, tape archive and any cloud copy — size the StoreEver library and media, and integrate it with your backup platform. UK delivery, configuration and support included.