When it was determined that computers needed a good place to store the information they created, the tape drive was invented. This is a very old piece of computer technology, and as a result, you can imagine that it is not usually used for any but the most necessary of applications.

First of all, tape drives operate in the same way as a video tape does – it consists of a magnetic tape that is spooled out, written to, and then re-spooled. If you remember trying to cue a VHS or BETA tape to the correct part of a movie, then you can probably guess one of the biggest problems with using tape to back up important data that you may need to access quickly.

If you need to get back to a particular piece of data, then you have to run the entire tape up until that point to get it back. This is due to the fact that information is saved sequentially onto tape media. One benefit of tape media is that if you make the tape long enough, you theoretically have an unlimited amount of storage space. Therefore, huge corporate computer networks that have terabytes or more of information sometimes still use tape drives but they're much faster than the old models some of your reading this may be accustomed to.

Tape drives also spool slowly in general, which is done to make sure that the tape is not damaged while it is being written to. If just one part of the tape is damaged, the entire backup is pointless and the tape often is simply disposed of.

As you can either imagine or guess, these types of data storage were not widely available for a very long period of time. While there were some old computers that used small tape drives to get programs or games into the computer, most personal computers did not have a lot of backup storage capacity until the floppy disk was invented and finally provided an alternative to the tape drive.

So what are the main problems with tape drives?

There are quite a few to be frank. Tape is a very fragile material and one of the main problems that tape drives have is the tape itself getting snagged, bent or even broken at any point on the tape itself. Once this happens you need to start the entire backup process again with a fresh tape or you'd have to splice the old tape together again (not recommended). The information stored on data tapes is in a magnetic format so exposing the type to any type of electro-magnet or x-ray device can wipe the entire tape clean.

For the home computer user there are lots of different backup options that are far superior to tape drives - not that any home user is still using a tape drive to backup information to surely? For example, you could get an external USB hard drive and put the data there. You can also save all of your information to CD-Rs or DVD-Rs instead and this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of data backup options for the modern computer user.