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by RL_Quine 1535 days ago
Tapes are not that slow, 360MB/s per drive, and on a large scale swapping them is completely automatic.
2 comments

In support of your point, 360MB/s is an extremely conservative estimate. I'd expect that from LTO-6, which is around ten years old, and I would certainly hope their backups are on more modern gear than that.
I work for a pretty huge well-known fortune 500 company with a global presence and personally handle the tape rotations for several of our data centers, and they're all still on LTO-6 tapes
I'm not sure that's relevant. I would expect Home Depot, Berkshire Hathaway, Alphabet, and Atlassian to have wildly different priorities. Two of them are Fortune 500 companies that I think would do fine with LTO-6. Atlassian is supposedly a cloud-first organization which arguably should be pretty aggressively tiered anyway, much less tiered onto outdated tech.
And that's just one drive. I ran a piddling departmental backup server and we had a dual-drive library.

Four drive libraries are pretty common, too.