Many people don't appreciate tape, but for long term offline storage nothing else comes close.<p>Offline storage is important if you care about things like ransomware.<p>The problem I find with disks for offline storage is that they're very easy to turn on and very easy to zero. Tapes on the other hand are much more difficult to get to if you're in the business of ransomware.
When I graduated from college I stored all my projects on a magtape. About 10 years later I discovered that there were essentially no drives in existence that could read it, because 1) the drive that created it was hopelessly obsolete and 2) it had drifted so far out of spec that even a machine of the same make/model could not read the tape.<p>I threw it out, and have been soured on tape for long term storage ever since.<p>Fortunately, I had also downloaded a few files over the phone to a PDP-11 with an 8" floppy drive. I can no longer read those floppies, but I regularly copy all my files to new media every year or so.
According to the table in the article, improvement from 2010 to 2020 was 7.5×, from 1.6TB to 12TB. The projected improvements by 2030 are 32×, so I'm a bit skeptical.<p>It's too bad that cheaper drives can't be made with old technology. Perhaps by making much larger cassettes? Everywhere I've worked the total cost of a backup system built on tape was higher than buying HDDs due to the drive itself.
Can these LTO drives and tapes be used reasonably for a continuous backup system? What I want is something that just mirrors all disk writes to the tape so the tape ends up as essentially a log of all disk writes since the tape was inserted.<p>That could have a lot of starting and stopping on the tape, which might be bad so it would be acceptable to have some sort of buffering so that the tape only needs to be written when a lot of changes have accumulated.
FWIW an option I use at my home/office is a 2u 12bay supermicro box running freenas with extra hard drives as the backup DST (Destination).<p>Using periodic replication on the source (also freenas/ZFS) and some Scripts I wrote using ipmi to start up the DST box-<p>I have the DST machine downstairs at my house And once a week for about 12 hours it auto powers up, the auto application starts and after about 12 hours shut down. (10g uplink)<p>So outside of 12 hours a week the machine is powered off. Not the best solution and it does have Some sec holes, but it was something cheap to backup alot of data.
LTO specifications update at regular schedules employing forced regularized innovations, something like P times capacity every Q years and R times more effective storage with compression thanks to new XYZ technology invented after last update, so that corporate users can easily plan ahead for equipment upgrades.<p>That’s not how innovations work but they have been doing that for decades.
I like the top comment chain there where there's a conversation like this:<p>User A: Tapes are OK, but I wish there was new tech. Probably optical.<p>User B: Impossible to get this density with optical given wavelength requirements.<p>User C: In 2D yes, but maybe with 3D disc storage. The technology isn't there though.<p>User B: Consider a tape on its side...
> As reported by Chris Mellor of Blocks and Files, Fujifilm points to using Strontium Ferrite grains in order to enable an areal data density on tape of 224 Gbit-per-square-inch, which would enable 400 TB drives.<p>What keeps us from applying similar tech to HDD?
I kind of wonder with drive tech if they know they could have gotten 400TB out of tape 10 years ago, but they were like.. Meh, we'll slowly scale it up so we can sell a new drive every year. The progression in the technology is just so smooth. Well I'm not one of the 200 or so people on planet earth who actually knows how to manufacture this kind of drive, so I guess I'll never know.
I was excited until I saw it was tape.
Drives will probably be thousands or tens of thousands of dollars and then the individual tapes would probably be in the hundreds or more. Since this tech is almost exclusively sold to enterprises and priced accordingly.
330 TBs cartridges from Sony (2017)<p><a href="https://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press/201708/17-070E/" rel="nofollow">https://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press/201708/17-070E/</a>
Question: Is Amazon's “S3 Glacier Deep Archive” storage tape storage?<p>price: $0.00099- 1 GB, SPEED OF RETRIEVAL: 48 hours for bulk, 12 hours for standard, FIRST BYTE LATENCY: Select hours
Meta:<p>Should the format of these types of headlines be:<p>* Some Important Statement: Speaker (Fujifilm here)<p>Or should it be:<p>* Speaker: Some Important Statement<p>Is one more 'proper' than the other?