Which backup medium is commonly used for archival storage due to scalable capacity?

Which backup medium is commonly used for archival storage due to scalable capacity?

• A. Tape drives
• B. NAS storage
• C. External hard drives
• D. Optical discs

Answer: (C)

When backing up for long-term retention, you want a medium that can grow with your data without breaking the budget. Tape drives meet that need because capacity scales by adding more tapes to a library, giving you thousands of terabytes or more as you expand, with a relatively low cost per gigabyte over time. Tapes are built for longevity and offline storage, which helps protect archives from environmental risks and certain threats while keeping stored data ready to restore when needed. This makes tape a trusted choice for archival storage. External hard drives, while convenient, aren’t ideal for archival-scale archives due to higher failure rates over time and less favorable cost-per-terabyte over large-than-small datasets, plus they’re typically not managed as part of a long-term offline strategy. NAS offers good access and restore speed for active backups, but achieving archival-scale capacity with NAS becomes expensive and less efficient, since it relies on many drives with ongoing power and cooling. Optical discs can be durable, but their per-disc capacity is modest and scaling to very large archives is impractical and unwieldy.

When backing up for long-term retention, you want a medium that can grow with your data without breaking the budget. Tape drives meet that need because capacity scales by adding more tapes to a library, giving you thousands of terabytes or more as you expand, with a relatively low cost per gigabyte over time. Tapes are built for longevity and offline storage, which helps protect archives from environmental risks and certain threats while keeping stored data ready to restore when needed. This makes tape a trusted choice for archival storage.

External hard drives, while convenient, aren’t ideal for archival-scale archives due to higher failure rates over time and less favorable cost-per-terabyte over large-than-small datasets, plus they’re typically not managed as part of a long-term offline strategy. NAS offers good access and restore speed for active backups, but achieving archival-scale capacity with NAS becomes expensive and less efficient, since it relies on many drives with ongoing power and cooling. Optical discs can be durable, but their per-disc capacity is modest and scaling to very large archives is impractical and unwieldy.