The future of backup is being shaped. No, don't get rid of your tapes, tape is still the lowest cost optimum medium for long-term historic archiving of data. What's changing is, instead of simply backing up on a nightly basis, companies are now starting to backup on hourly or even on continuous basis.

This type of backup allows you to restore data to any point in time and since most of such backup systems use the Shadow Copy component already built into your Windows file system, it doesn't take up huge amount of resources on your servers.

Products like Symantec's Backup 11d Continuous Protection Server and Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager use the Shadow Copy component to backup many versions of protected files so you can restore from 5 hours ago, 5 days ago or 5 weeks ago. Of-course, you can go back to 5 years ago if your backup rotation archives data for that length of time.

The future is to use disk to disk to long term storage methodoloy. Since this method backups up live data to disk, the backup window can be very small, once the backup to disk has been made, data can be slowly transferred to tape or online media for archival purpose. Additional advantage is that data can be compressed, encrypted or deduped before going into long term storage saving money over conventional non-deduped data.