Techworld.com - The slow death of tape market:

"...tape is invaluable, irreplaceable really. Nothing else could hold the vast volumes of data required for so little money.

However, it is being asked to do a job it wasn't meant for. It's being asked to recover files that careless users deleted. A backup archive comprising millions of files relating to an entire business's operations, representing millions of pounds of invested capital and revenue is being asked to retrieve an inadvertently deleted mail message relating to the purchase of a pair of door hinges"

From my (admittedly, fairly limited) most places are looking at some sort of hybrid disk/tape system, with daily backups going to disk, and weeklies being written to tape from that disk pool.

This gives a couple of major benefits - firstly, the daily backups go through a lost faster - you can generally write to a disk array of some sort a lot faster than you can write to tape - and you can have multiple machines writing to the backup server at once. This means your machines are back up and running at normal capacity a lot sooner. Secondly, you can browse the backup archive without endangering your backups - disks are much better at handling random access than tapes are, and a lot less fragile. Last, but definitely not least, you can free up your backup admin's time, and give the users a (read-only, of course) way to restore their own files - in many cases, the included software links this into the user's desktop almost seamlessly.