When I first started working at our 911 center the hard drives were backed up onto tape. We had to change a bunch of them every night and go through a specific procedure which was a time consuming pain in the butt. It was a relief when the system was upgraded and backup and storage was moved off site, but I do wonder how much more reliable the new system really is.
I started out with cassette tape storage on home computers in the late 1970s. What a miracle when we were able to afford a floppy disc drive. “Home computers” typically used single sided 5 1/4” floppies to begin with. You could buy a notcher so that you could turn them over and use the other side. Some people believed that the dirt collected by the wipers built into the floppy would release the dirt they had collected and they would self destruct when turned over and they were running the opposite direction, but I never had any trouble.
I originally had dual 320 kB double sided dual 5.25” floppies on the first PC XT Clone that I put together. They were upgraded to dual 3.5” 720 kB double density floppies, and then later these were upgraded to 3.5” “1.44 MB” high density drives which became the standard for many years.
The first hard drive I purchased was for an XT clone that I put together. It was a 10 MB MFM unit that fit in two 5.25” bays and cost 100s of dollars. My first tape drive was a QIC 40 multi-track which could back up 60 MB. I had a program that controlled it and the hard drive and could essentially have the two of them simulate a much larger hard drive with what could sometimes seem like a lot of delay when it had to retrieve something from the tape.
A friend of mine had a controller that worked with a VHS Video tape recorder to store data on video tapes. Video recorders used a rotating head to store the data on the tape not in a straight line but as multiple diaginal lines running across the tape. It stored what seemed like massive amounts of data at the time for much less expense per MB than the QIC tapes but it was a very expensive setup by comparison with some other disadvantages in retreival times as well.
A friend of mine had a controller that worked with a VHS Video tape recorder to store data on video tapes. Video recorders used a rotating head to store the data on the tape not in a straight line but as multiple diaginal lines running across the tape. It stored what seemed like massive amounts of data at the time for much less expense per MB than the QIC tapes but it was a very expensive setup by comparison with some other disadvantages in retrieval times as well.
Alpha Microsystems made a VHS backup controller. If I recall, they could write the backup to the same VHS tape as a form of redundancy.