[bsdice]

Think about malware that encrypts everything on every HDD+SSD storage within reach in the company. Assume it somehow got all admin passwords. Doesn't even want money for the decryption key. What now?

One method for business continuity would be LTO in a fire-proof safe to bootstrap the business back into life. Malware couldn't infect or encrypt the data on tape, because of the air gap and inherent "offline" nature.

[dragontamer]

Except a backup NAS could accomplish the same thing. Or a backup to Backblaze / S3 storage or something.

Lots of ways for the "all data was destroyed" situation to come out. Tapes are kinda-sorta useful for this situation because capacity is so so so cheap, you can keep full copies of the important data in your tape library pretty easily.

[rodgerd]

Malware authors are already adding hooks to delete data from Glacier, Netbackup, and other popular backup tools. If it's online, it's toast.

[dragontamer]

I guess for the truly paranoid, LTO / Tapes have that "Write-Once Read Many" feature if you really were worried about some virus overwriting your stuff.

[rodgerd]

Well, tapes have the ability to be easily removed, which is their killer feature vis-a-vis malware.