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Disk is great for backups and speedy recoveries, and should play a key role in a DR plan, but tape is still the best choice for data protection and retention. The calendar may read 2013, but I still hear IT professionals and vendors assert that disk-based storage is always best when it comes to protecting business data. To me, that's more of a "1999" mentality. Admittedly, from a performance perspective, disk will usually be your best bet. You can compress and deduplicate data more efficiently to disk, and it's certainly a faster data-restoration medium when you're trying to re-establish part of your environment from a backup. In general, disk is superior to tape- or cloud-based storage as the first tier of recovery. But when it comes to long-term retention -- adhering to a seven-, 10- or 25-year data preservation policy -- using disk alone is nearly always impractical. Tape's tarnished past So why has tape been reduced to lingering in the shadow of disk as a viable long-term data retention tier? In part, it may be because data ...