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Tape vs Cloud Backup for Tampa Bay Dental Practices
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Ezra Angelo
- • July 24, 2026
LTO tape remains the most cost-effective medium for storing large volumes of data on a per-gigabyte basis, and dental CBCT archives can grow to hundreds of gigabytes or terabytes over a practice’s lifetime. Cloud backup charges per gigabyte stored and per gigabyte transferred, which makes large CBCT archives expensive to back up and recover from cloud storage at scale. Tape does not charge per gigabyte after the media and drive are purchased.
Ekim IT Solutions is the dental-exclusive IT provider serving Tampa Bay from our office at 600 N Westshore Blvd, Suite 701, Tampa, FL 33609, and tape backup versus cloud backup is a question Tampa Bay dental practices with larger imaging archives are asking more frequently as cloud backup costs increase with data volume.
The comparison is not simple because tape and cloud backup have meaningfully different characteristics that affect how each functions in a dental practice environment and how each performs against the threat profile dental practices actually face in 2026.
LTO tape is the least expensive storage medium per gigabyte for large data volumes. It is also the slowest to recover from and the most vulnerable to physical disaster. A dental practice whose only backup copy is on LTO tape stored in the same building as the server loses both the primary data and the backup in a fire, flood, or hurricane landfall.
LTO Tape Backup for Dental Practices
LTO tape, currently at LTO-9 providing 18TB native capacity per cartridge and LTO-8 at 12TB, is the most cost-effective medium for large dental imaging archives. A single LTO-9 cartridge storing 18TB of CBCT data costs approximately 20 to 30 dollars, which is dramatically less expensive per gigabyte than cloud storage at scale. For Tampa Bay practices with CBCT archives exceeding one terabyte, a tape-based backup for the imaging archive alongside a cloud backup for the PMS database is a cost-effective hybrid approach. The PMS database, which is smaller and more critical for day-to-day recovery, goes to cloud for fast recovery. The imaging archive, which is large and slower to restore, goes to tape for cost-effective long-term retention.
Cloud Backup for Dental Practices
Cloud backup has distinct advantages over tape for Tampa Bay dental practices. Tap an advantage to see what it involves.
Cloud backup stores data in a geographically separate location automatically, without requiring physical media rotation. For Tampa Bay practices in the hurricane zone, having the backup offsite without manual effort is a meaningful operational advantage.
The Hybrid Approach for Tampa Bay Dental Practices
The backup architecture Ekim IT Solutions most commonly recommends for Tampa Bay dental practices with large CBCT archives is a hybrid approach: cloud backup with immutability for the PMS database and recent imaging data for fast recovery and ransomware resilience, supplemented by LTO tape for long-term CBCT archive retention where cloud storage cost at volume becomes prohibitive. This satisfies the 3-2-1-1-0 backup standard while managing the cost of storing large imaging archives.
Frequently Asked Questions
Ekim IT Solutions serves Tampa Bay from our office at 600 N Westshore Blvd, Suite 701. We help you weigh tape against cloud backup against your real archive size, growth rate, and threat profile, not just a per-gigabyte price tag.
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- • July 24, 2026
