Before cloud backup, a company's safety net was a rack of magnetic tape. Overland Data, from San Diego, made the drives and robotic loaders that copied servers onto cartridges every night so the data could survive a crash or a fire. Its customers were IT departments that had more files to protect every year. When it went public in February 1997, corporate networks were growing fast, and so were the hours it took to back them up.

Robots That Swap Tapes

Overland's products ranged from single tape drives to libraries that held many cartridges and swapped them with a mechanical arm. A library let an office back up large amounts of data overnight without anyone changing tapes by hand. Overland sold under its own name and also built products that larger computer makers sold under their brands. That second channel brought volume but tied Overland to a few big customers.

Disks, Then a Merger

Overland Data priced its IPO at $10 a share in February 1997 on Nasdaq. It later renamed itself Overland Storage and added disk-based backup and storage systems as tape lost ground to cheaper hard drives. Profits were hard to find in a crowded market. In December 2014 Overland merged into Sphere 3D, a virtualization company, and its shares left Nasdaq.

Cover: Halt of a Wagon Train, Winslow Homer. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a wagon train at rest (overland travel).