I built such a cloud service; you can archive the data uploaded on our cloud storage to tape on demand, and we'll send you the tape back when requested (you basically buy the tapes once, and they're yours, no string attached). It failed to gain any traction, though.
First off, mad props for building out the service. That was an ambitious idea and I’m sorry it didn’t take off. Second, if you ever write a blog or article about it someday please mention it on hacker news.
Sounds like a good idea. But I am guessing it failed as it wouldn't be attractive for common folks because, while the tapes might be affordable, tape drives are really expensive and uncommon.
In fact the service is tentatively targeted to content producers. Most post-houses do have LTO drives (it's a requirement to work with NetFlix among other to archive to LTOs). The idea is that any content owner can bring their tapes to the post house when needed (where they would actually use it) instead of USB disk drives.
Having given some thoughts, your potential business success depends on convincing the clients to not buy a tape drive, and addressing the above concerns. Smart pricing can address the former, but the latter needs more brainstorming.
Some of the issues you need to address:
- Trust. How can someone trust you with potentially proprietary / copyrighted data?
- Speed. Is it faster to copy the data to a tape locally, then to transfer to you?
- Reliability. How can the client be sure that you have made a successful backup?
- Advertising. Did you reach your target base to make them aware of your product and address all their concern to make them consider it?
Yes, that's the point. When you're a content creator and you're making at most a couple of TB of data per month (typical figures), hardly enough to fill a handful of tapes a year, it's hard to justify the expense for a tape drive. OTOH cloud storage is either too complex (S3, Glacier) or too expensive (Dropbox, Box) for this volume of data.
Trust: yep, hard to say for this one. At least I can provide actual guarantees (for instance, none of our storage is out of the country).
Speed: it's possible to send us tapes directly. However the main selling point of our solution is to allow people to upload relatively small volumes of data continuously, then archive it all to tape in large batches when you have enough to fill an LTO.
Reliability: the interface allows the user to see where their files are (on which tape), to run checksum controls on tapes, and restore from tape. Every tape is sold with 3 free operations a year (archive, checksum verification, restoration).
Advertising: that's clearly not our strong point :)
