[Zenst]

One of the biggest things that has been going for tape as archive/backup storage has been that it is proven durability compared to alternatives in regards to bit rot. AT least that was the mantra for decades, not been active for years so may of shifted and price of solid state and storage rotation I would of thought offset things. But then that would be a live backup as opposed to something you want to archive and maybe never touch for eons, maybe for some regulation aspect you just need to archive that data and in a form that is acceptable to the standards of that industry. Which would be another factor and that would be legacy - it works, it has worked for ages and proven and trusted in X use for X industry regulatory needs and as such - ticks an insurance/liability box. Things like that from a technical aspect get overlooked as it is not just the technical aspect but also the whole industry/business/regulatory standards.

I know for one company in the pharma industry we looked at optical storage and for some uses it was fine, but for the long-term archival aspect in your store and 99.999999% forget about storage backups/archives it just didn't tick enough box's due to being unproven and when you get down to use X and if it fails you can say you did all the right things and if you use something that technically may be better and it fails, your head and massive fines and fallout can ensure much more easily. So tape for many been one of those - it works, why change.

[cawigames]

Tape still has big advantages over other mediums: it's relatively cheap in terms of price/Gb, it's a lot less complex than hard drives, and a lot more recoverable than SSDs.

On the other side, it has minute-long seek times since the tape needs to be rewonund/ff (that's an eternity compared to already-deprecated milisecond-long HDD seek times) and it's not suitable for many write cycles (some tapes are even sold as WORM (write once read many), same as the old CD-R drives)