I didn't know they ever stopped storing data on tape. Tape to my knowledge has been pretty much in continuous use at big corps since their invention. Sure there was things like AWS glacier becoming possible alternatives but tapes are pretty entrenched.
Tape is perfect for things like police bodycam recordings. They need to store a ridiculous amount of data for decades, and don't need access to it in real time. Cops/Courts/etc are happy to wait a day for video retrieval because the costs are so much lower.<p>I've also thought about how you could store medical patient data on tape, and retrieve it the day before a patient comes in. Or storing other types of data, and having ML record what gets retrieved when and try to predict it to reduce retrieval times. Too bad other storage is so cheap!
I've never set up a backup system that didn't have tape rotated into cold storage as its last step. As far as I know, nothing ever came along that offered the same value for longevity.
The suit is back! <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html</a>
I use to work at a small health insurance company with a tech staff of 10 people. 1 persons entire job was to essentially managing the tape backups and getting them sent/picked up from offsite storage. This was a senior network administrator.
The primary advantage that tape still holds over disk is shock resistance. You can drop a tape cartridge and still expect to get all of the data off it, but that is not the case for a really high density disk drive.<p>An interesting thing that might change this would be one time programmable multi-level flash (OTP MLC flash). It has the shock resistance of tape, the random access of disk. The $/TB is slowly converging when you consider total cost of ownership and reliability of the equipment to read/write these.<p>At some point someone is going to do the needed mechanical engineering and that just might be the end of tape.
We still use tapes at my enterprise. I'm on the network team, so I don't really work with the tapes directly, but it doesn't seem as inconvenient as it might sound.<p>We have a few large "tape libraries" in our data centers. The tape libraries have a robotic arm that handles the bulk of the tape swapping and organization. Humans are involved in loading the tape library and carrying the tapes offsite for storage.<p>I'm speaking as someone who has had a couple of casual conversations about the tape libraries and am not involved in the management of them in any way. They could actually be a huge pain.
I don't think it ever went away in larger companies.<p>A few months back I was looking into tape hardware, and I was disappointed to find that the barrier of entry is too high for consumers with only dozens of TBs. Based on my calculations at the time, for my desired data size it ended up cheaper to just buy a bunch of HDDs.<p>How do HDDs compare to tape when it comes to long-term storage? I've read lots of mixed reports.
We stopped using tape just because datasets are too large. Fulls and differentials are not feasible at petascale. With LTO7 - a petabyte takes over a month to backup with a single drive. You need 50 or so to pull it in a day, assuming your storage can do 15GB/sec sustained.
A relative of mine works for quantuam, a tape producer. There is some interesting history about standardization and the big players ganging up on the little guys.<p>You can also buy tape drivees online :) <a href="https://www.newegg.com/Backup-Drives/SubCategory/ID-46" rel="nofollow">https://www.newegg.com/Backup-Drives/SubCategory/ID-46</a><p><a href="http://www.quantum.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.quantum.com/</a>
How well does tape compare to DNA?<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_digital_data_storage" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_digital_data_storage</a>