As tapes are essentially mechanical they unfortunately don't last forever. In fact the industry standard recommendation is to replace them every 4-6 months, at least for those serious about backing up their data.

So how much do tapes cost? Of course this depends on your particular tape drive - lets call this cost £Tape.

One tape for each day of the week is 5 x £Tape.

Then change the tapes 4 time per year. This is 5 x £Tape x 4.

Insert your figure for £Tape to get an actual number. We'll consider the maintenance cost of tapes in a later blog.

With online data backup no tapes exist so this cost is zero.

Professional online data backup