Why are they spending all this money on a backup system that makes it “too hard” to go and retrieve something?
There are different types of backups. When a catastrophic failure occurs, the system needs to be restored to the closest point in time to the failure. At the enterprise server level you never want to go to the tape. It is a last resort. Many enterprise systems have a failover system in place. Archiving of older data would be a separate mission. According to the testimony I saw at the IRS hearings, archiving of files was done by sneaker net.