Moving tapes in and out of the tape library and to offsite storage, purchasing new tapes, replacing old tapes, and removing tapes out of long-term storage when a company's data retention policies require archived data to be purged. It can be stored for years (in proper conditions) however, it also requires a lot of maintenance. Tape media is immutable and may be the single best place for your backed-up data. NOT ALL BACKUP MEDIA OR BACKUP SOLUTIONS ARE IMMUTABLE. It’s important for small and medium businesses (SMBs) to realize that not all backups are created equal, and the quality of your backup process can mean the difference between a successful restore or permanent data loss. If your backups are also attacked, then your data is at serious risk of not being able to be restored. If you are attacked by ransomware, backups are the de facto way to recover from this. If your backed-up data is not stored on immutable media, it is susceptible to ransomware attacks. The nefarious bad people in the world of ransomware are now able to insert their ransomware into the backups of your data. The bigger concern, really, is ransomware. This data should be safe, and it should be accessible as needed for a restore.

So, you might ask: Why would I be concerned about this? Our backups are stored in two places: on the appliance and in the cloud. Backed-up data needs to be stored on immutable media, so that it cannot be changed. If we apply this to a backup, we are now talking immutable backups. The simple definition of immutable is 'unchanging over time or cannot be changed'.

Immutable backups definition