My company moved EiBs of data off of tape a few years ago. It was reliable and durable, but the problem was read speed.
It took so long to move tapes around and read the sequentially (no random access!), and as the data corpus grew it got harder to have a practical backup, even though the data was still theoretically extant.
dale_glass · 2h ago
The bit on tape tension was really interesting!
Turns out that modern drives can stretch the tape to make tracks line up right. It makes sense that as density grows, the real world effects of things like temperature and humidity require more and more work to compensate for.
netbioserror · 18m ago
Given the gains in tape and hard disk densities in recent years, why can't we revisit floppy disks as a potential long-term archival media for the future? Are they particularly volatile? Would the design of the physical disk case be able to solve for such issues?
johnklos · 5h ago
Most of the people who parrot the "tape is dead" stuff haven't used tape.
When it comes to the reliability of putting something on a shelf, then pulling it off twenty years later, tape still is better than everything else.
kvemkon · 47m ago
> tape
Only once (or very few times) overwritten?
> on a shelf
At home or in a specialized room with controlled climate?
At least I cannot find quickly the requirement in someone (or a robot) pulling each tape once a year(?) and doing a rewind? Which is formally needed for HDD.
Btw, shouldn't HDDs be much more resistant to magnetic fields than magnetic tapes?
Edit:
26TB HDD Non-operating / storage:
Temperature -40 to 70°C (Storage 0 to 70°C)
Relative humidity 5 to 95% non-condensing
Maximum wet bulb temperature: 35°C non-condensing
Maximum temperature gradient: 30°C/Hour
LTO 9+:
Recommended Storage Environment: 15 to 25℃ / 20 to 50%RH / Max Wet Bulb Temperature: 26℃.
Stray magnetic field at any point on tape not to exceed 50 oersteds (4000 ampere/meter).
Yes, definitely true. And maybe they are even more relevant now because of all the data needed for deep learning.
However, the drives are expensive. This industry is in dire need of disruption.
wongarsu · 1h ago
The break even point between tape and hard drives is somewhere around 400TB. A lot for a personal data collection, but not that much in absolute terms.
bombcar · 3h ago
$5k for a LTO9 drive isn’t terribly bad; once you have any significant number of tapes.
Expensive for home use, but they can buy older technology off-lease.
buran77 · 2h ago
> Expensive for home use, but they can buy older technology
I can't imagine home users being interested in buying mostly used SCSI or SAS tape drives while navigating a world of format compatibility challenges and problems with improper storage. Environmental requirements for archival are narrow and most homes don't tick that box over many years or when moving.
This medium is expensive, inconvenient to use and store, and in the world of home use those are killers. You don't need to take my word for it, look around at tape home use.
Home users are better served by cloud storage or an external hard drive, maybe a home NAS, especially for the relatively low data volumes home usage usually involves.
dale_glass · 11m ago
One thing that worries me about home tape use is dust and cat hair.
I've had a DDS4 tape way back, which ended up dying, and that could well be the cause. My house is not going to be as clean as a server room.
I've seen tape drives taken apart and there seems to be a worrying lack of concern with any kind of air filtration on the ones I've seen at least. And I don't think it should be all that hard to deal with it. Maybe something like sucking air in through a replaceable filter and exhausting it out of the tape door.
adrian_b · 1h ago
The choice between magnetic tapes and disks depends mainly on the total amount of archived data.
Some years ago, after I bought a LTO-7 drive at around $3000 as a home user, I have recovered its costs after about a couple hundred terabyte of stored data.
Unfortunately, nowadays the drives for LTO-9 have increased in price, so the cutoff threshold has probably increased to several hundred terabytes.
Even when the amount of stored data does not provide significant savings in the cost of storage media, it may still be worthwhile to use magnetic tapes, for improved peace of mind and for avoiding the hassle of copying the data to newer HDDs every few years.
I am old enough to have seen enough data loss disasters, so I would never trust cloud storage, where the access to my own data would be dependent on my ability of making continuous payments to an external entity, which is really hard to predict for any distant future. Moreover, even with a fast Internet link the access speed to cloud storage is an order of magnitude slower than to a local tape drive or HDD.
amelius · 27m ago
How about small startups?
rowanG077 · 4h ago
Yep since IBM has the monopoly they have been squeezing everyone to the maximum degree. Too bad HP stopped their tape drive development. They kept IBM under control.
It took so long to move tapes around and read the sequentially (no random access!), and as the data corpus grew it got harder to have a practical backup, even though the data was still theoretically extant.
Turns out that modern drives can stretch the tape to make tracks line up right. It makes sense that as density grows, the real world effects of things like temperature and humidity require more and more work to compensate for.
When it comes to the reliability of putting something on a shelf, then pulling it off twenty years later, tape still is better than everything else.
Only once (or very few times) overwritten?
> on a shelf
At home or in a specialized room with controlled climate?
At least I cannot find quickly the requirement in someone (or a robot) pulling each tape once a year(?) and doing a rewind? Which is formally needed for HDD.
Btw, shouldn't HDDs be much more resistant to magnetic fields than magnetic tapes?
Edit:
26TB HDD Non-operating / storage:
Temperature -40 to 70°C (Storage 0 to 70°C)
Relative humidity 5 to 95% non-condensing
Maximum wet bulb temperature: 35°C non-condensing
Maximum temperature gradient: 30°C/Hour
LTO 9+:
Recommended Storage Environment: 15 to 25℃ / 20 to 50%RH / Max Wet Bulb Temperature: 26℃.
Stray magnetic field at any point on tape not to exceed 50 oersteds (4000 ampere/meter).
[1] https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library...
[2] https://www.fujifilm.com/uk/en/business/data-management/data...
[3] https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/storage-deep-archive?topic=media...
However, the drives are expensive. This industry is in dire need of disruption.
Expensive for home use, but they can buy older technology off-lease.
I can't imagine home users being interested in buying mostly used SCSI or SAS tape drives while navigating a world of format compatibility challenges and problems with improper storage. Environmental requirements for archival are narrow and most homes don't tick that box over many years or when moving.
This medium is expensive, inconvenient to use and store, and in the world of home use those are killers. You don't need to take my word for it, look around at tape home use.
Home users are better served by cloud storage or an external hard drive, maybe a home NAS, especially for the relatively low data volumes home usage usually involves.
I've had a DDS4 tape way back, which ended up dying, and that could well be the cause. My house is not going to be as clean as a server room.
I've seen tape drives taken apart and there seems to be a worrying lack of concern with any kind of air filtration on the ones I've seen at least. And I don't think it should be all that hard to deal with it. Maybe something like sucking air in through a replaceable filter and exhausting it out of the tape door.
Some years ago, after I bought a LTO-7 drive at around $3000 as a home user, I have recovered its costs after about a couple hundred terabyte of stored data.
Unfortunately, nowadays the drives for LTO-9 have increased in price, so the cutoff threshold has probably increased to several hundred terabytes.
Even when the amount of stored data does not provide significant savings in the cost of storage media, it may still be worthwhile to use magnetic tapes, for improved peace of mind and for avoiding the hassle of copying the data to newer HDDs every few years.
I am old enough to have seen enough data loss disasters, so I would never trust cloud storage, where the access to my own data would be dependent on my ability of making continuous payments to an external entity, which is really hard to predict for any distant future. Moreover, even with a fast Internet link the access speed to cloud storage is an order of magnitude slower than to a local tape drive or HDD.