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Can magnetic tape be rivaled as an archival medium?


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keep in mind that typically, you are not keeping the backup tapes for very long, you recycle them after a few days. We back up daily, we have rotating tape sets that leave on Monday, come back next Monday, leave Tuesday, back next Tuesday...5 days worth of back up of all corporate data are cycling all the time in case of a catastrophe. That's all, not rooms full of old tape...just a couple of little 'lunch boxes' sitting in the trunks of our cars every night...no one gets 2 consecutive day's worth. You just overwrite the data, simple process. We 'retire' tapes after about six months and get new ones. The old ones get destroyed.

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we have thousands of DDS tapes, a room full of it, and they get erased according to the conditions in the contract with the clients, and some don't get erased at all, and when a client wants the product once more after the tape was erased, he pays the work once more

in other words not all folks work like daddymack

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What's the latest developments in this area? Should I buy Ampex stock?
;)

 

If you buy Ampex stock you'll be buying an interest in hard drives and memory. Magnetic tape is a fine storage medium. I have audio recordings here that are more than 50 years old that still play and I can still enjoy them as much as when I recorded them - more, actually, because most of the people playing on those recordings are dead now.

 

Of course you have to take reasonable care of your tapes, and when it comes to computer data on tape, eventually it will be difficult to find something to play them on, so that's why people who care refresh them on a current medium on a fairly regular basis.

 

You've probably heard the story of some NASA tapes from the first moon landing that they didn't have anything to play them on. Some folks are busy (if not yet finished) assembling a suitable playback deck from scrounged parts. And the nice thing about analog audio tape is that as long as we have reasonably precise machine shop capabilities and some basic electronics, we can build what it takes to play the tape.

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I spent the last 25 or so years of my IT career as a database administrator for some fairly large companies. Part of my responsibilities were daily backups/restores of the enterprise data, disaster recovery (DR) and quarterly DR recovery tests. This included large scale systems on both IBM mainframes and UNIX systems. ALL used tape, daily backups with cases of tapes sent offsite to Iron Mountain and rotated back into the tape robots every 2 weeks. Yearly backups and some others required by various laws were kept 7-10 years. On the mainframe side, we never had a tape read failure after moving to cartridge tape. On the UNIX side, the backup software was not nearly as reliable, but the media was not the issue. Non-critical backups went to virtual tape eg., disk arrays that look like tape drives to the system.

Backing up a datacenter (Google, other large enterprise) vs. a music studio has different requirements; handling and shipping hundreds of hard drives offsite daily would not be feasible. For archiving of the amount of data in a studio, I'd still probably use both. Redundancy. Maybe I'm just old school, but after restoring terabytes of data in DR tests over the years, my paranoia served me well. But no matter what physical media is used, in the long term, software/hardware to read that media needs to be considered. A 7 year old tape isn't much good if you don't have a drive or software to read it. Same with a hard drive. Or those floppy disks I have in my closet :facepalm:

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