Tapes have been the definite archive media for many years and will probably continue to be used for this purpose for many years to come. What seems to be the most natural transition for backup and restore operators is to migrate the archive feature to other solutions, such as Backup Vault in Azure. For more information regarding the Backup Vault Azure recovery service, refer to Chapter 11, Azure integration.
In this chapter, we will cover tape management in System Center Data Protection Manager 2012 R2 and provide you with the information to get started with archiving your data to tape media. It will teach you the basics of tape management and some more advanced concepts of configuring, tape optimization, and last but not least, report handling.