Planet Labs' approach to orbital debris mitigation is discussed here: https://www.planet.com/pulse/k... tl;dr the satellites re-enter and burn up very quickly, most within a year or so.

Tapes can fail too, of course. :)

The intent is not to substitute for tapes, but to supplement them. This technique makes the most common types of restore operations very easy (so that users can do it without admin assistance), and means you might not have to make backup tapes as often. When you do make backup tapes, you can pull them from a weekly snapshot, so that you're guaranteed the filesystem doesn't change while the tape is being written!

Mike