Taking Tapes off site

Question

We have a PowerVault 122T LTO2 (Autoloader). Do most people continue to daily eject tapes and take them off site? This thing appear to be pretty sturdy and durable. I think nothing short of a nuclear disaster will harm these things. It would seem that daily ejecting and inserting tapes would cause more chance of damage than keeping them in the autoloader and periodic testing of backups

Dev Mgr · Answer

Daily ejecting tapes shouldn't be a problem. Offsite tape storage is usually done to prevent dataloss in case of a building fire or theft. A vault could help, but can only withstand so much. Companies that do offsite storage usually have 3 or 4 sets of tapes as a minimum to cycle thru so that at any given time at least 1 set is at the offsite storage location.