| ▲ | kjellsbells a day ago | |
Back in the era when Zip drives were around, there was a prosumer/SMB tape standard: 1/4-inch QIC. I sold many PCs with a tape drive in one of the drive bays. They were awesome. They also sucked from a support point of view. People would mistreat the tape. Store them next to giant magnets or on top of the microwave in the restaurant. Forget to run the weekly backup and then blame you when they lost files. I couldn't wait to get them on to CD-RW which showed up for SMBs very soon afterwards in the late 1990s, and then eventually to the cloud. What a relief to no longer need magnetic media. The irony now is that many of the SMBs I see today (though I no longer consult for them) have effectively zero backup because all their business process is tied up in a SaaS that they do not control. Eg their website is on squarespace, their tasks are on Asana, and their finances are in Quickbooks. Any one of these goes dark, or out of business, or is vandalized and it's curtains for the whole business. | ||