What backup solution works for air-gapped networks and tape-based offsite copies?

There are several other possibilities depending on your budget and how much administration you want to handle: Barracuda appliances, HYCU with S3 storage, Amanda, Catalogic, and Quest Rapid Recovery. Amanda can write to disk, tape, or cloud, but the open version is more command-line oriented and takes some effort to configure properly.

Before choosing another product, clarify the exact compliance finding that ruled out Veeam. Without that detail, it’s difficult to make a meaningful recommendation, and current versions may address issues that existed years ago. Veeam supports tape workflows, air-gapped deployments, and compliance features such as FIPS mode, so it may be worth having the current version retested against your requirements.

Rubrik is technically excellent and has worked well for us, although it costs more than Veeam. Its usual offsite approach is an immutable cloud target, such as Rubrik Cloud Vault or an S3-compatible service. Direct tape support is more limited: you generally need a QStar tape library, which adds another component to maintain. Cloud Vault can also be cheaper than public-cloud storage once storage and egress costs are included.

Commvault is another enterprise option with strong support for large environments, tape, and compliance controls. It’s not always the easiest product to like or administer, but it is mature and capable. Rubrik is generally considered easier to operate, while Commvault offers a broad feature set.

For isolated systems, make sure the product supports offline update repositories, removable media procedures, immutable or write-protected copies, encryption, and regular restore testing. The compliance requirement should drive the shortlist; otherwise, you could end up replacing one product only to discover that the same control blocks the next one too.