A financial‐services firm must comply with regulations that require it to keep weekly full backups for a minimum of 10 years. Each backup set is about 200 TB, restores are expected to be extremely rare, and management wants the copy to be stored offline to reduce ransomware risk while spending as little as possible on long-term media costs.
Which backup media type BEST satisfies these requirements?
Magnetic tape provides the lowest cost per gigabyte for very large, long-term retention sets and can be physically removed from the network (air-gapped) to protect against ransomware. Although disk appliances offer much faster recovery, their purchase, power and refresh costs make them significantly more expensive for decade-long storage. Cloud object storage eliminates on-premises hardware but incurs recurring capacity, egress and retrieval fees that quickly exceed tape at multi-hundred-terabyte scale-while still remaining online. Printed hard-copy archives cannot realistically hold hundreds of terabytes and would be prohibitively bulky and labor-intensive to re-create. Therefore, tape best meets the cost and offline-isolation goals for this scenario.