Comment by StopDisinfo910
9 days ago
To be fair, tape backups are very much ok as a disaster recovery solution. It's cheap once you have the tape drive. Bandwith is mostly fine if you want to read them sequentially. It's easy to store and handle and fairly resistant.
It's "only" poor if you need to restore some files in the middle or want your backup to act as a failover solution to minimise unavailability. But as a last resort solution in case of total destruction, it's pretty much unbeatable cost-wise.
G-Drive was apparently storing less than 1PB of data. That's less than 100 tapes. I guess some files were fairly stable so completely manageable with a dozen of tape drives, delta storage and proper rotation. We are talking of a budget of what 50k$ to 100k$. That's peanuts for a project of this size. Plus the tech has existed for ages and I guess you can find plenty of former data center employees with experience handling this kind of setup. They really have no excuse.
The suits are stingy when it's not an active emergency. A former employer declined my request for $2K for a second NAS to replicate our company's main data store. This was just days after a harrowing data recovery of critical from a failing WD Green that was never backed up. Once the data was on a RAID mirror and accessible to employees again, there was no active emergency, and the budget dried up.
I don't know. I guess that for all intents and purposes I'm what you would call a suit nowadays. I'm far from a big shot at my admittedly big company but 50k$ is pretty much pocket change on this kind of project. My cloud bill has more yearly fluctuation than that. Next to the cost of employees, it's nothing.