Printer-friendly versionDigital Tapes are good when you want to archive exact copies of very important media such as Digital music or videos. Over time, when storing files on a Hard Drive, parts of file data can be lost or become corrupted when the media is damaged in some way such as an unexpected reboot of the machine, a power outage and the like. When it comes to music and videos, if you lose any part of the data, those parts will not be able to be played correctly and you will hear or see some kind of static when playing these types of files. File Archives such as compressed zips could become unreadable without some kind of CRC checking. People who are serious about archiving always use tape media for reliable storage for the following reasons.
1. Tapes have a longer life expectancy and durriblity then most media types. Most CDR's/DVD'r have a 10 year life span.
2. Files cannot be accidentally deleted from tape, you have to format the whole thing and overwrite it for any kind of destruction to happen to data. With external hard drives, you never know when or why your data could be corrupted. Just plugging/unplugging the device can cause file corruption.
3. Tapes have more storage durability and have less moving parts. If you drop a hard drive from 5 feet off the ground you could lose the data on that drive, taps don't have the problem for the most part.
