There are lots of different thoughts. I'm not convinced that
there's a single silver bullet that's the best all-around medium
for all types of
archiving or environments. But, there are
some very good mediums, including disk drives, which are both
fixed and removable. Some drives can even "sleep" where they
spin down for prolonged periods to save power and wear on the
drive mechanism. Another option for archive besides traditional
tape solutions, in which the tape cartridges do not consume
power when not in use, are removable disk drives that can be
placed into existing robotic tape libraries providing a hybrid
benefit of random access of disk, with the power saving benefits
of traditional tape. Removable disk drives can be sent off site
like tape cartridges. Even traditional tape is still employed
for archiving. Optical WORM drives are also used, though these
occupy more of a storage niche.
The choice of medium for file archiving really depends on your
preferences and business needs, so there are many options to choose
from, each with varying levels of capacity, performance, data
preservation capability, reliability and cost effectiveness (not
necessarily the cheapest). Consider your requirements, including
the features that you absolutely must have, and then contemplate
any value-added features, such as compression, data deduplication
or replication.
Go back to the beginning of the
File Archiving FAQ Guide.