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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.

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.

Drives can have issues reading data written by another drive. Drives can have issues reading a tape it wrote itself.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

I came across this website that provides LTO tape pricing references (I have no affiliation with the site).

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)

https://tapebackup.org/lto-tape-price-trend/lto10-price

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.

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.

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...

Surely it’s AI, and not archive-now-decrypt-later attacks, right?

BluRay M-Disks are cheaper and more resistant to humidity / heat.

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…

The cost of backing up slop gets added to the cost of generating it in the first place, I suppose.

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

That's what they keep telling everyone else for years now...