I don’t know about you but I am sure tired of tape backups and the amount of time I have to spend in labor and materials to backup data, run the verify routine to ensure data was actually backed up, take tapes out for shipping offsite, get them to the dock for offsite shipping, validate the shipment, periodically 
visit the offsite vault, periodically get tapes back for recycling and to periodically test for restore validation only to find that the back still didn’t work even after backup remediation. The amount of labor and effort to run this operational task has worn thin. No longer am I interested in dealing with tape for anything but keeping my bumper on the old car with duck tape. Other than that, tapes and cartridges need to go the way of the floppy disk. Time to take them out back and shoot them! And the cost? “For example, a four-drive system with an 80 cartridge library is common, with prices in the $30,000 to $80,000 range. For the large enterprise, Abraham suggests a much larger library with up to 64 tape drives and the robotics necessary to swap tapes from a library of 5,000 cartridges or more.”
There has been much to do about Cloud services but storing data through disk to disk backup is not new and storing it in this fashion through a remote connection is not knew. In fact, the services are quite mature and have been in play for decades when you consider mainframe capabilities. So we call it Cloud now and that is fine. The solution has matured over the years bolstered by the dotcom error and glut of high-end data centers that now have new life for many different Cloud services.
Storing your mission critical data offsite has always been a requirement for any disaster recovery plan. With all the regulations we have to deal with and the new ones that are forthcoming, I see no reason to continue on with the error-prone, tape-based solutions that require way too many moving parts, each one an opportunity for defects and lost time. I found one solution that looks quite solid for the SMB marketplace where so many companies cannot afford a full suite of hardware, software and 
movable parts.
I have decided to move to disk backup only. I have been doing it at home for years and just upgraded again with NAS storage off my wireless LAN that runs nightly and is used at my house to share data. I do not have my home storage at a secure data center but I do backup my backup, but this again is disk to disk.
When I consider the potential issues associated with a legal hold, I really don’t want to have to hunt tapes. It has been awhile but I do remember trying to find the right tape with the right data during a legal hold associated with e-discovery. It would have been much easier to restore data from disk with a direct view of the folders and I would not have had corporate legal breathing down my neck.
Moving to an all-online 24x7x365 access operation saves staff time while removing risk from the business. No more restore errors. It just does not make sense to pay for this infrastructure when I can rent it today and use it tomorrow.
