Anyone that's never had the (dis)pleasure of working with tapes, there's some gotchas to know about before archiving and forgetting about it.<p>When you create an archive, do not skip the step of reading it back. I'm not talking about just having the system confirm it is readable. I mean actually restoring the data from the tape. I've had tapes fail to retrieve data off of the tape even though the writing app confirmed it was readable.<p>Drives can have issues reading data written by another drive. Drives can have issues reading a tape it wrote itself.<p>Why write one when you can write two at twice the time/cost? In all of my experience with tape, I've never written just one tape. In the early days of DVDs, the images were written to LTO to send to have the discs pressed. Two were always sent on the chance one wasn't readable and schedules were so tight that the loss of a couple of days to send a new tape would wreck delivery dates. Another facility wrote three tapes: one kept on site, one sent to IronMountain, one sent to the client directly. Plenty of occasions saw the local copy unreadable and the IronMountain copy was retrieved. These were managed by large robotic tape libraries so each tape was written in a different drive at the same time so it was 3x cost while only 1x time.<p>Use the drive cleaning cassette as recommended. Your dirty heads can cause the data to not be written/read correctly depending on which head is dirty. If you're having issues reading, clean the heads before giving up on the tape. If you're having issues reading a tape just written, do not think someone else will be able to read it.<p>Ensure whoever might be using a tape you've written understands what was used to write the tape. Not all archivers are compatible. If you use the tar command to write to tape, people using a GUI app won't be able to read it.
I have worked with 5 different LTO tapes versions, 5 different other cassette formats (DAT, DDS, etc), and open spools… never, ever, ever in the 15 years had <i>ANY</i> problem (I’ve probably used 1000 of them). We did cycle them very often, we did have proper maintenance of the drives, through. Now that, compared with RAID Disk arrays, where we had monthly failures, was much better. Also I would not trust the „semi-permanent“ NVMEs, where after 1 year without power they get basically reset
1000 is a lot but it sounds like GP was a few orders of magnitude higher.
I worked with a few more orders of magnitude and saw lots of errors.
When I hear wildly differing stories like this I often wonder how much environmental conditions play a factor in the different experiences that people have.<p>Perhaps one of you is living in a much more humid and/or hot environment that causes issues with the writing process.
Tapes were constantly kept in the data center, so constant temperature and humidity 25C/50%. As I said, Tapes were changed after N uses, drives properly serviced. So if you leave them at home, in the sun in summer and in winter expose them to 10C with humidity from 10% to 90%, old drives, never clean heads… IdK
That all being said, when I started working there, in my ignorance, I said “TAPES?!?! They are not reliable” due to my experience with audio tapes. But I was laughed at, and they told me about people putting 10 9 track spools in a car [0] (by the way, the same we used for billing backups!) and they went literally thousands of miles driving on partially dirt roads, in summer w/o AC, doing updates to systems, and also never ever had an issue. They were so sure they would work, that they did not take a second set, even when driving 1000 miles, and a read error would mean going back!!!<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9-track_tape" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9-track_tape</a>
Usually it wasn't the tapes that were unreliable, but the tape devices (firmware) and/or the drivers. Years back I used to work on a backup product - one of the tape devices would write a random amount of zeroes after each round of N megabytes written to the tape. So if you were "lucky" and all the backups were below N megabytes in size, everything worked perfectly. We weren't even aware there was an issue until some of our customers started complaining.<p>Debugging this was really fun, especially due to the randomness factor. :)
1000 tapes over 15 years sounds doesn't sound like a lot tbh.<p>I suspect that the number of problems you encounter from tapes scales superlinearly because they physically move. This leads to a lot of unpredictable failure modes. HDD racks also fail a lot, but in more predictable ways because all the data is managed in software.
I suppose there could potentially be magnetic factors at play as well.
I lost nearly all of the software I wrote while at Caltech due to the university's magtape drive being out of spec so only that drive could read the tape.<p>There wasn't any value to it, but I wish I still had it.
Is there some reason that the data is not written to a section of tape using one head, and then read off of that same tape 1 inch (hundreds of milliseconds? tens?) later using a separate head for verification, before it's tucked back into the spool?
> <i>The read-write head has 32 read-write elements. Each element contains a write component sandwiched between two read components – one for reading, the other for read-after-write checking. The overall read-write head reads or writes 32 adjacent tracks at once. This group of 32 adjacent tracks running the length of the tape is called a wrap. The write tracks are partially overlapped, leaving a clearly readable read track, narrower and in the middle of its write track. This track overlapping is called shingling after shingled roof tiles, and is a way of cramming more write tracks into a data band to increase the tape’s capacity.</i><p>* <a href="https://www.blocksandfiles.com/tape/2025/07/29/why-lto-10-fell-short-on-speed-and-backward-compatibility/1588360" rel="nofollow">https://www.blocksandfiles.com/tape/2025/07/29/why-lto-10-fe...</a><p>> <i>The tape drives use a strong error correction algorithm that makes data recovery possible when lost data is within one track. Also, the head assembly includes separate read heads positioned just "behind" each write head, to verify the data just written without making a separate verification pass. This allows the drive to write a second copy of any data that fails the verify without the help of the host system.</i><p>* <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Logical_structure" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Logical_struc...</a>
I think the issue arises if the tape is out of alignment - ie. too high or too low. Then it writes in the wrong spot, reads in the wrong spot, so you think all is good...<p>But when you try to read it back with a different, correctly aligned machine, it is unreadable.
I used to do a ton of data-retrievals during litigation - pulling Iron Mountain LTO tapes back by the container (24 per container) - and restoring email and other data for the lawyers to comb through. We had a smallish 48-tape library, and this would have been 2003 - so old school LTO-1 I'm guessing (?).<p>Data was only 3-4 years old at most, but there was never a recovery failure - at least one that was visible during the restore process.<p>Oh - important data-point - we never re-used tapes. It was one-and-done-and-off-to-iron-mountain. (That eventually would have changed - but we were only 4 years into our tape-rotation when I left)<p>Anecdote of 1, but it was over probably 10+ restores of data. Not certain how many tapes were actually read - we would just jam them in 24 at a time and let the index figure out which ones to restore from.<p>The caution to validate backups by doing constant restore + validation is a good one though. Nobody cares about backups, it's the restores they want.
From your experience are any of the big cloud providers more effective/careful at this than others?
The big cloud providers use something like erasure coding across a collection of tapes (or hard drives) to preserve information. If you've ever downloaded something from usenet and restored it with quickpar, this is basically the same idea. Every physical cartridge gets a chunk of the file. Depending on parity settings you would have to lose many tapes distributed across an arbitrary # of locations to actually lose any data.
Note that the hardware the big cloud providers use for tape archives is very different from the devices the GP poster appears to have used, and usually have robust verification systems.<p>In addition the need for cloud providers to comply with userdata erasure means they have to frequently test their ability to read and write their backups - which should increase your confidence in their correctness. Yes problems can and do still happen, but IME far less often than the more traditional tape setups GP describes.
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Great points. To add some more:<p>* Don't rely on vendor-specific compression and/or encryption which may vary between different tape drives.<p>* If you do use encryption, try to ensure you have a way to recover from corruption in the middle of the bitstream (see parent's point on two copies, or CTR/GCM mode, or FEC/erasure coding).<p>* Index the contents (file names, sizes, at least), or use an archive format that puts the index at the start of the tape (note: tar does not).
Companies should only ever use tape with a good robotic tape library. LTO tape drives automatically read every single write to verify the data immediately.
Are there any recommended alternatives to IronMountain nowadays?
Symantec Backup Exec was genuinely one of the worst pieces of software I have ever had to use. Later in life I got to use the IBM Storage Archive setup with much larger tape libraries which still sucked but my god the level of competency difference between the two applications was insane.
If you want to take advantage of tape's low cost per TB for your own data backups, without the big capex of tape hardware, I heartily recommend rustic's cold storage support for Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive. It ends up being $1/TB/month, as long as you plan to not restore from it. (Use it as a secondary backup, and plan to restore from your primary.) I have been using rustic+GDA for about a year now, and I contributed some enhancements to this software ecosystem to make this path smooth for others. With this solution, I am no longer tempted to buy my own tape hardware!<p>[1]: <a href="https://rustic.cli.rs/docs/commands/init/cold_storage.html" rel="nofollow">https://rustic.cli.rs/docs/commands/init/cold_storage.html</a>
If I don't plan to restore from it, how do I know the archive is a valid backup?
> $1/TB/month<p>if you actually do the math, that's expensive
Yeah, it's nice for small amounts, but $60 per TB per 5 years is more than hard drives plus parity, even with recent price increases. If you're anywhere near the sweet spot for tapes they'll be significantly cheaper.
I came across this website that provides LTO tape pricing references (I have no affiliation with the site).<p>LTO-10 30TB: $259–$300 per cartridge (~$8.63–$10/TB)
LTO-10 40TB: $491–$555 per cartridge (~$12.28–$13.88/TB)
LTO-9 18TB: $92–$129 per cartridge (~$5.14–$7.17/TB)<p><a href="https://tapebackup.org/lto-tape-price-trend/lto10-price" rel="nofollow">https://tapebackup.org/lto-tape-price-trend/lto10-price</a><p>One thing worth noting is that the tape cartridges themselves aren't necessarily the biggest expense. Standalone LTO-10 drives are currently listed at around $25,000.
> <i>One thing worth noting is that the tape cartridges themselves aren't necessarily the biggest expense. Standalone LTO-10 drives are currently listed at around $25,000.</i><p>The drives are a fairly fixed CapEx: once they're purchased they don't cost must/anything to run. You may replace them every few years with newer tech for higher capacities of course.<p>Libraries/robotics last even longer, and can stick around for a decade or more once purchased.
When I was dealing with tape the main problem was that the drives were very expensive, and they never lasted as long as their expense would have you hope. They have a complex exposed mechanism full of fairly fragile tiny plastic parts.<p>And for long term archive storage, the main problem is not the media, it is how are you going to read the media. With the drives being considerably more fragile that the tapes. A good plan is to store an entire spare restoration kit with the media. With the understanding it probably will not work when it needs to. So store the really critical stuff printed out so the mark one eyeball can parse it.
What makes the drives so expensive? Is it just the fact that they're still pretty niche?
It's niche, yes. But also an incredibly high-precision mechanical device, designed for constant operation.<p>But the fact that -ALL- LTO drive-mechanisms are build by IBM maybe also doesn't help the pricing...
> LTO-10 30TB: $259–$300 per cartridge (~$8.63–$10/TB) LTO-10 40TB: $491–$555 per cartridge (~$12.28–$13.88/TB) LTO-9 18TB: $92–$129 per cartridge (~$5.14–$7.17/TB)<p>Just a note: do NOT buy LTO-10 right now. The capacity increase is not worth the price bump, and the drives are still very new. There are still no half-height drives for tape libraries available, for example.
You don't need a $25,000 LTO-10 drive, $100,000 library, and $300 tapes. The drives are frequently backwards compatible multiple generations, so your archives are safe. You can get LTO-7, LTO-8, and LTO-9 libraries for cheap (right now there are lots of LTO-7 standalone drives for under $1000 on ebay), as they've aged out of enterprise leases.
You got me briefly excited, but the only LTO-7 drives on eBay under $1000 are listed as parts-only. The price jump from LTO-6 to LTO-7 has remained steep for years; either industry is holding on to them, or they're being resold or released successfully.
You're right, I didn't catch the (For Parts Only) labels when you click into the auctions. It looks like there are some working LTO-7 drive sleds that can be adapted into storage vaults for under $1000, though you're in for another $1000-$2500 for the vault.
That's got worse recently. LTO used to be guaranteed compatible two generations back; an LTO-7 drive can read LTO-6 and LTO-5 tape. With newer standards, they've cut that to one generation. Your point stands, but folks should be aware the treadmill has been sped up in the past few years.
Ouch, only one generation now? Back in the day, we started with a second-hand LTO-3 tape library, then upgraded to an LTO-5 when that died. I remember learning about this stuff (we were only an SME, not an enterprise, so didn't have any knowledge about these things), and realising we'd have to be careful with our upgrade plan.
Yes, drives are very expensive and that's why there is a business for renting them. Even Amazon Snowball offered that [1]. There are other rental services such as [2] but many of them are not LTO-10 yet (don't know if it really matters right now).<p>[1] <a href="https://docs.aws.amazon.com/snowball/latest/developer-guide/snowball-edge-availability-change.html" rel="nofollow">https://docs.aws.amazon.com/snowball/latest/developer-guide/...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://mediastoragegroup.com/" rel="nofollow">https://mediastoragegroup.com/</a>
Why can't they make an attractively priced pro-sumer tape drive solution?
While this isn't what you asked, there are plenty of used older generation LTO drives to be had for cheap on ebay. A few years back I got an HP LTO-5 drive for $85.<p>Plus, having your backups on used hardware _instills_ the importance of proper backup hygiene like nothing else!
This is not very realistic. Recordable and rewritable Blu-ray Discs are a much more consumer/prosumer-friendly backup solution, and yet, due to low demand, the market is slowly dying. The market size for prosumer tape drives would probably be even several times smaller.
I've never thought of (re)writable optical media for backups as having a particularly good user experience. I'm not saying tape is good or better but blu-ray is a lot of faffing about. In theory, the much larger capacity that tape can provide should reduce the faff factor, but the devil is in the details.
Yes, DVD and Blu Ray suffered a lot from varying degrees of quality in the media. Low quality chemicals led to huge error rates and unusable media, even after it was written.<p>About 20 years ago, we used to keep track of this stuff. Even batches from normally excellent brands would be bad. We considered this short term, volatile storage.<p>At the end, even the best brands outsourced and we quit using them. Now, M-Disk from Verbatim is decent, although rarely used.
All the remaining blu-rays are actually pretty good. The cheap ones have died off, and everything that's left is made by one of a few manufacturers with non-organic dye and at least passable quality that I would expect to last 20+ years in proper conditions. The good ones I would expect to last longer.
it's just not viable to deal with hundreds or thousands of bluray discs
The market is tiny and already served by surplus enterprise gear
Maybe if this 5x production ramp up finds that the demand wasn't there long term we will have a prosumer line after all.
It was hard to do this <i>before</i> the future of personal computing became uncertain. Now that normal people are being priced out of computing altogether, it's essentially become impossible.
Economics.<p>It's cheaper for consumers to have a drive bundled with the data storage, such as a hard drive.<p>Tape drives will always be needed for those who need fewer IOPS but more capacity. After all, tape drives allow you to build tape libraries with custom capacity vs drives (aka IOPS and bandwidth).<p>Consumers are more predictable and want IOPS more than capacity. So SSDs already are better, let alone HDDs.
Because the entire market would be a few thousand people.
Circa 1994 my parents purchased a PC that came with a QIC (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarter-inch_cartridge" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarter-inch_cartridge</a>) drive, which was less than a $250 addition (closer to ~$500 inflation adjusted). This was just before ZIP drives were announced, back when the standard backup was limited to 1.44MB drives. Wish there was something comparable in the market today.
Maybe that ship has sailed? Used to be a thing, but now people rely on cloud backup and assume they are doing the right thing.
Done right, cloud backup actually is "the right thing".<p>There are problems with cloud backups, but they are solvable. One is confidentiality/privacy, that's what encryption is for. The other is that you can lose your data because the could provider doesn't like you, it is a failure mode, in the same way that your tapes can burn. Use redundancy, like with any unreliable storage solution.<p>With an onsite NAS, local copies and cloud backup, you meet the "3 2 1" rule (3 copies, 2 storage types, 1 offsite) without the hassle of dealing with tapes, and it will probably be cheaper too, unless you are particularly data-hungry.
Tape drives are really picky compared to HDDs: they don't like it when the environment is too hot, or too cold, or too humid, or too dry, or too dusty, or with too many vibrations, etc. They're really only meant for datacenters with controlled environments. A prosumer version would need additional engineering for environmental tolerance that the enterprise ones don't have, and end up costing more, not less, especially with the tiny markets involved.
It kinda blows my mind that every tape drive I've seen disassembled seems to make no attempt to filter the air.<p>As a nerd that formerly had a DDS4 drive it's tempting to get an older LTO drive, but sadly I can't expect it to survive for long in a house full of cat hair.<p>And it's kinda maddening because it can't be all that hard to have some filters.
Maybe so but my consumer priced 3d printer has this for my filament.
Tape drives were a thing in an enormous number of companies and offices, all over the world, prior to the last decade. Even now, loads have them.<p>They're not only used in such controlled environments, but yes, they are pickier.
I've supported QIC, DDS, VXA, DLT, and LTO drives since the late 90s. The common factor for a good experience has been stable environmentals for the drive. QIC and VXA were probably the most forgiving, with DDS being the worst. I had some bad experiences with DLT, too, but nowhere as bad as DDS. Drives that were over-temped or in dusty environments were the worst, regardless of technology.
Not enough market demand? A typical user is fine with a small NAS. Hard drives are also easy to buy, and they were relatively cheap.
The cost of tape is a big deal for for some bigger science experiments.<p>They often cost billions to build and they take loads of data, but most of it ends up heavily distilled by the time it goes to the final analysis pipeline, so keeping the raw data on tape is pretty common.<p>There was a time when tape was more specialized and we were worried about loosing our limited suppliers. The explosion in the ML that powers search and more recently the AI boom makes the technology look a lot more stable these days, which is a relief for us.
BluRay M-Disks are cheaper and more resistant to humidity / heat.
I wish that were true.<p>Alas, M-Disks are hugely more expensive than magnetic tapes, even when not taking into account their much greater volume.<p>The biggest M-Disks are of 100 GB and the cheapest that I see on Amazon (in 25-piece sets) are at about $9 without taxes and shipping. At that price, I can buy not 0.1 TB, but 2 TB of magnetic tapes, which also have a much lower volume, at 18 TB per tape for the older and cheaper LTO-9 cartridges. I can easily carry with me a suitcase with 360 TB of data (20 LTO-9 cartridges), or store it in a safe place. Carrying 3600 M-Disks or storing them in my home would be impossible.<p>M-Disks may be used only to archive some small amounts of more valuable data, e.g. documents or programs that you have written yourself, a few scanned legal documents, a few more important books, a small amount of music that you prefer, a few family photographs.<p>For bulk data, if you cannot afford the cost of tape drives, the only alternative is HDDs, but with HDDs you must take care to always use both duplicate HDDs and archive files with redundancy, which allow the regeneration of their content when any not too large part of the file becomes corrupted. You must also take care to migrate the data periodically to new HDDs, after a few years.<p>Due to their small size I have not tried to use M-Disks until now, so I do not know if my older Blu-ray recorder can write them. There is also the problem that the availability in the future of Blu-ray recorders and readers is uncertain.
I just put my image archive for the last 20 years on a single 100 GB BDXL disc, around 11 000 files. Granted these are mostly cell phone photos, not RAW or anything like that. I did the same with documents on an M-Disc DVD and email mbox-archive on another M-Disc DVD. All disks with copies of dvdisaster and a separate slimline usb-c drive. Chucked offsite in a fire proof safe. I think M-Discs or any HTL bluray a fine supplement to an otherwise comprehensive backup strategy.
> but with HDDs you must take care to always use both duplicate HDDs and archive files with redundancy<p>I'm a noob when it comes to tape backups. Is copying the same stuff to multiple tapes standard practice?<p>> There is also the problem that the availability in the future of Blu-ray recorders and readers is uncertain.<p>LTO drives used to read tapes from 2 generations back, then just 1. LTO 10 isn't backwards compatible. Future availability of compatible tape drives is also uncertain.
I do not know how standard such a practice is, but I am old enough to have witnessed enough disasters caused by data lost due to carelessness, so I have no intention for something like that to happen to me.<p>Therefore with HDDs I have always written the same data on 2 HDDs, and this saved me a few times, when after several years of storage both HDDs contained a few corrupted sectors, but not in the same places.<p>With tapes, I also always write at least 2, but frequently even 3, because their low cost makes this affordable. With tapes, the greatest danger is that if a drive malfunctions mechanically while a tape cartridge is inserted, it might damage that tape.<p>Having at least 2 copies of each tape or HDD also allows their storage in different locations.<p>Like I have said, I always combine this redundancy of having duplicate storage media with intra-archive-file redundancy, so I typically add 10% redundancy to each compressed and encrypted archive, so that for any corruption that affects less than 10% of the file the content is still recoverable.<p>I am still using the older LTO-7. While I might upgrade to LTO-8 or even LTO-9, an upgrade to LTO-10 is unlikely, unless great price reductions will happen in the future, which I doubt.<p>So I am very concerned by the lack of a good archival solution that is affordable by ordinary people and by small businesses, not only by very rich companies.<p>Microsoft has demonstrated an ideal archival medium (in glass), but for now the cost of their laser system is too great for commercialization. That appears to be mostly a chicken and egg problem, the lasers and the other optical components are too expensive because they currently are produced only in very small quantities, but they cannot be incorporated into a high-volume application, because they are too expensive.
Drive cost. Ease of restoration. Resistance to an EMP attack.
From prices I can see it's 10-20x more expensive than tape archives.
M-Disks are not cheaper than tape for bulk data storage. Once you're doing enough of this that you're not limited by the cost of the drives, it's about a factor of 25: $150/TB for M-disk vs $6/TB for tape.
Bluray is cheaper per unit, but not per terabyte.
But will there be any bluray drives available in the future?
Which LTO are you comparing with? Locally (Spain) it seems I get similar EUR/GB for BlueRay M-Disks as LTO-8, but LTO-7 and LTO-6 is way cheaper than BD. What exactly are you comparing here?
Surely it’s AI, and not harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks, right?
"Fujifilm highlights the ability to air-gap tape cartridges as a last defense for user data: “Given the sophistication of cyberattacks, magnetic tape is attracting increasing attention as a means of protecting data from threats such as ransomware.”"<p>I mean, it's plausible, yet I find it hard to believe this solely drives demand 5 times. Because if it does then what, companies were <i>not</i> using cold storage backups before?
> <i>I mean, it's plausible, yet I find it hard to believe this solely drives demand 5 times. Because if it does then what, companies were not using cold storage backups before?</i><p>As someone in HPC: people <i>never</i> delete stuff. It can stick around forever, and so if more bits are generated, there are more bits that people don't want to delete "just in case". Depending on the organization, quota enforcement can be tighter or looser.<p>HSM is fairly popular in the HPC space for this reason:<p>* <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_storage_management" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_storage_managemen...</a><p>Your newest/hottest bits are on NVMe, anything older than (e.g.) 3 months gets move to SSD, anything older than that to spinning rust HDDs, and then to tape.<p>There are several file systems where this happens in the background: the file still shows up at /path/for/stuff/foo.txt but the contents are shuffled about behind the scenes.
I suspect very very few companies have cold storage backups.
Datacenters being blown up by drones and rockets in kinetic war is probably what drives demand, not "AI".
> Because if it does then what, companies were not using cold storage backups before?<p>What I observed in the rising cybersecurity attacks happening around me:<p>(i) There are organizations thinking that they have [complete] backups and being aware they don't once the cyberattack if effective.<p>(ii) Even in organizations with complete backups they don't have a [good] process to recover them, and the operations suffered a lot.<p>Corollary: backups are, in general, not battle tested.
yep, in my observation the ratio of "having backup processes" to "having periodic disaster recovery drill" is somewhere in the area of 20:1.<p>Even within the same company. Every division has backup processes, only few actually try to recover the data once in a while...
At least they have a process. That gives you a chance. Often the process itself is good - you didn't test it but the vendors all did and so the data is there - it might be hard to restore, but it can be done by experts after the fact. The drill means you can recover in a "short time" instead of a "long time" (short time can range from minutes to days, while long time days to years)
yes and no.<p>I've ran drills with companies which concluded that the incremental backups couldn't be restored due to some data corruption issue (no readback test was ever done).<p>Luckily the company also did a full backup every 6 months, so a disaster would have only thrown them back 6 months at max! /s ;)<p>But yes, some issues were even more simple: I had a case where performing a restore required twice the storage size of the uncompressed data, and the company actually didn't have the infrastructure ready to do that in case of a disaster...
I'll bet that if it really was important you could pay someone (LLMs make this easier) to dig through the data byte by byte and get everything back despite the corruption. It would take years, and be very expensive, but typically there is enough redundancy to figure it out. Often you only really need a small subset of the data and can live without the rest.<p>Don't get me wrong, drills are important! You should do them. However backups without a restore drill better than no backups at all. Even if you only get the last full backup, the data from the last 6 months will be the easiest to recreate from scratch if you must.
No, it's harvest-now-train-later.<p>I'm suspecting the AI companies simply save everything (even if you said "no"), just in case they need it later for training.<p>Why? Because there is no moral anymore. They blatantly ignored copyright after all.
What happened to glass cubes etched with data at layers even more densely packed than bluray?
I can't really tell what happened to this. It seems like Microsoft wound down the "Project Silica" thing they had been talking about, their final post/research paper on it said "The research phase is now complete, and we are continuing to consider learnings from Project Silica" which kinda sounds like corp-speak for "it's over", and I haven't seen any commercial activity in this area since.
Seems like a controlled market. Data storage needs an AI moment too :D.
Tape is a fascinating technology, I recall reading the account of the SONY cofounder <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_Japan:_Akio_Morita_and_Sony" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_Japan:_Akio_Morita_and...</a>
and the crazy things they were trying to make their own tape media because they had no supply because of the war. They were ultimately successful in creating a compact tape machine but they had to build up their expertise in tape media from literally nothing.
maybe they should 5x the production of 35mm film, too.
There might be a huge potential for an AI which scrapes your (and my!) data and concludes what I can safely delete, saving the world tons of resources.<p>The millions of pictures I never got to sort, the multiple versions of a file that I wrote 2 years ago, etc.<p>But in the view of an AI-company that's probably a paradox. All this data is charged and could be used to learn more about me, it should never be deleted! Instead, some hole should be carved out of a mountain to store it, billing me every month!
> There might be a huge potential for an AI which scrapes your (and my!) data and concludes what I can safely delete, saving the world tons of resources.<p>Thinking...<p>User has 15 pictures of his dead mother, deleting 14.<p>Saved 20 MB! :)
Why use AI when duplicate finders have been a thing for decades?<p>For the pictures, I set up a batch script the one time that used exiftool to read all of my photo's exif data (for creation date), rename the file to that date / time, and put it in a year/month folder structure. Once that's normalized it was pretty straightforward to identify and delete duplicates (assuming the exif data on duplicates has the same date/time in it).
You know what would be more efficient?<p>Shipping your drives to Sam Altman. If everybody did that, he could then deduplicate the pictures of the same thing that multiple people took.
Tape is the best data archive medium, and I will die on that hill.
Use disks only at your own peril.
I bought a fujifilm film camera 3 years ago.. it was about 300usd, now it is 2000usd, what is going on?
All the data AI vendors are slurping to surveil us needs to be stored for later, when they get enough compute to start taking advantage of it.<p>As time goes by, people are sending more and more. It started with just prompts, then the local source code, then calendar, emails, local files...
As if they weren't already sitting on a big enough pile of cash with Instax. Damn Fujifilm, always in the best plans.
Shameless plug : for those who plan to try out tapes, time to re-post my blog article "Managing tape drives and libraries with the Unix/Linux CLI" :)<p><a href="https://blogs.intellique.com/tech/2022/01/27#TapeCLI" rel="nofollow">https://blogs.intellique.com/tech/2022/01/27#TapeCLI</a>
it's fascinating how the general direction became to never delete data. All the attempts of taking a photo, all the downloads of bank-statements, all the useless emails.<p>At some point in the future the amount of data being stored indiscriminately must consume such a huge amount of resources and cost, that it becomes a hidden fixed cost within a country's GDP, without any tangible benefit...
Historians actually would love this. Currently many historians try to reconstruct how life was like centuries ago from accidentally preserved artifacts. Future historians would have no trouble understanding how our daily life is like.
don't we inflate this problem away? storage should get more abundant and cheaper and the old media looks comparitevly small compared to higher fidelity and higher definition formats that come later. so it doesn't matter if your gmail stores 20 years of useless emails.
> don't we inflate this problem away?<p>That continues to be the assumption, yes. Disregarding all the waste being created in the process.<p>What's fascinating is the fact that the production of TAPE sees a 5x boost. That's the format with the slowest retrieval rate, only making sense for long-term storage, usually 1+ years.<p>So is there really 5x more valuable data now, or is it just not economic to actually judge the need for preserving data...?
I have worked in tape for years. We can really tell there is a big boom after years of the market not doing super well.
Still an open question: How does S3 Glacier Deep Archive do it? Tape has been theorized but I’ve also heard arguments for very slow flash…
As storage costs have risen, cheaper tape technogy becomes more valuable
If only they'd boost film production too
Need it for my NAS that I will never make.
Fujifilm is pretty clearly trying to sell shovels in this market bubble. I haven't read the latest, but I would suspect their clientele has moved from cloud backups to AI training data, and they need to make a big show and dance of ramping production to join the bubble.
The cost of backing up slop gets added to the cost of generating it in the first place, I suppose.
Ridiculous that there is no proper data archiving solution for the masses. Tapes... in 2026 at exorbitant prices. Blu ray taps out at 128GB, meh. The DVDs I wrote 20 years ago still perform well and each of them readable, so don't tell me there wouldn't be a market for this at proper prices.<p>Cloud backup is good until a new world war erupts since data centers are gonna be bombarded first.<p>What is going on with cerabyte?
Sigh, I recently got into stereo photography and saw there's a shortage of transparency film. I suppose the stock's not coming back up any time soon. We can't even take photos thanks to the clankers can we.
I would have thought this is for archiving pre-slop-era data, but archiving slop might be archaeologically interesting too.
I don't understand, why don't these companies backup their data into the cloud? /s<p>That's what they keep telling everyone else for years now...
Not affiliated but I have to share.<p>Point.de<p>Point archival gateway.<p>Beautiful. I love it.