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How frequently do they back up to tape? (if this is something you can share)

Varies by product. In general, it is a continuous process, and backups may not be 'point in time'.

This is out of date; Google avoids tape exactly because the restore process sucks.

> As of 2019 it was a robust backup process with a pain in the butt restore process.

Would love some more insight on this! Anything or any article you can share on how this is implemented at such scale?

When I was there Google used multiple Sun/StorageTek tape libraries at each datacenter. The robots handled much of it, but there was still a lot of manual tape loading and unloading performed by technicians. Once tapes were full they were unloaded and hauled off to a secure third-party facility.

They're still sold by Oracle, as far as I can tell: https://www.oracle.com/storage/tape-storage/#rc30p5