tape shills always rant about how magnetic tape is so cheap, reliable,etc. Pure fiction. Its the most fragile, slowest and unreliable medium unless you invest in top quality hardware designed to accomodate the deficiencies and inherent fragility of tape. "Write-only" medium is the apt term to describe tape. Its intended to be stored for years and "recovered" someday, provided it doesn't degrade. In the 90's it was excusable as people were not going to write gigabytes on it, but now this shit is like worshipping CRTs.