Actually I asked that question before at another bank IT officer "Why banks still use magnetic tapes ah? Why don't you guys update a bit, like use hard drives? I mean, 1 external drive can easily store 1tb data, while tapes can only store like xxgb info"

He answered basically its the infra. You need to invest some serious $$$ on the infrastructure to extract info from the tape. You need to mount it to a tape server that uses proprietary software and other compilation programs plus other backup servers. External drives you only need a usb port, dah, cukup

Kinda makes sense what he said. Basically you can get your hands on the tapes but you can't extract the data so easily compared to usb ports

This post has been edited by bigwolf: Nov 13 2017, 10:58 PM

Many years ago oledi la, that time was lto2 - lto3 tapes

You'll be surprised how common lto3 - lto5 are still used nowadays

The other reason tapes are used is because of the infra. Its so much harder to extract info from tapes compared to hdd. Software aside, you just need a common usb port to access the hdd. But you need expensive specialized equipments to access the tape, hence the reason why tapes are considered "safer" compared to HDD

This post has been edited by bigwolf: Nov 14 2017, 09:03 AM

ONE of the reasons. Cost is also another factor as pointed out by selinix