I have a new computer as of a month or so ago.
I booted it up in Windows today with the view of making a backup.
This machine has couple of USB 3 ports and I plugged a 750 GByte Passport external drive in there and can make backups to it. I actually have two of those, each divided into two halves; one half Windows NTFS format and the other half Linux ext4 format. The main trouble is that the devices are too expensive and too large to store a useful number of them in my safe deposit box.

With Linux, I have no trouble backing up to a VXA-2 tape drive and those (8mm) tape cartridges fit very well in the box. In the past, running Windows XP Home, I could also back up to these tapes. But now with Windows 7 Professional, they have removed the ability to do that. If I rummage around, I see Windows knows I have a SCSI controller and a VXA-2 tape drive, that I have the appropriate driver for it, and so on.

But their backup program recognizes only my DVD reader-burner, my Passport drive, and a shared NTFS partition, on I can read with either OS. So How do I backup Windows to tape? I assume Microsoft believe their typical users never do backups, so why bother providing the software to do it. But tape is just another file, and they might as well allow writing to it and reading it. They do not. While the device manager knows it is there and working, it does not appear on Windows Explorer, so I cannot even do a simple copy of the image on the Passport to the tape.