Due to the rise in data and the cost of online backup, I recently recommended a client to move to multiple USB drives, these are now both small and fast enough to get a full bare metal server backup.

USB Drives are slowly taking the place of Tapes, both have their advangtages and disadvantages.

Tapes are more robust, harder to restore if they get stolen as you need a specialist hardware, namely a tape drive. This however is also a disadvantage as tape drives and the scsi adapters needed for tapes can run into the thousands.
USB drives don’t require any additional hardware (although nowadays a USB3.0 card would be recommended), but they can be read by far more devices if not setup correctly (I recommend encrypting your backup depending on your software) and they can be prone to damage if dropped or mishandled.

Anyway, getting back on track…