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The other day I was talking with a friend about the high cost and perceived fragility of tape drives for long term personal archival while bemoaning the loss of

The other day I was talking with a friend about the high cost and perceived fragility of tape drives for long term personal archival while bemoaning the loss of higher density optical storage technology. It's not easy to backup or shuffle around terabytes of personal video, audio and pictures. Hard drives aren't exactly the right media for safe deposit boxes. In the 90's I had an Iomega Ditto 250MB drive that held 120MB per tape for $15-20 per tape and my hard drive was 540MB. This was when hard disc storage cost $1000/GB. The tape drive had a quarter the capacity of the hard disc and was cheap by comparison. It was practical. Later when CD burners came out they offered 650 then 700MB when hard drives were less than 10GB. Then they became too small and DVD came out but shortly was also passed up as 4.7GB wasn't much storage. Bluray was DoA with too little storage to be of real interest with a paltry 25-50GB. I'd love to see CHEAP >=1TB optical discs with a write speed of 100MB/s allowing us to burn a disc in ~10 minutes. I'd happily pay $1 a disc in bulk and upward of $1000 for a drive. I'd also happily pay $10+ for an archival disc that has a guaranteed shelf life of 50+ years. Bring back the 100 disc juke boxes while we're at it ;-) Cheap storage for everyone!

zitterbewegung 5y ago
Why are tape drives fragile? I use them for my long term backups of personal files I thought they were robust ?
- jl6 5y ago
  What scale are you working at and how have you made it cost-effective versus a stack of external HDDs?
  - adrian_b 5y ago
    I am not that poster, but I also use tapes. One may save about $14 per TB by using tapes instead of external HDDs (which strangely have become cheaper than internal HDDs). In order to recover the cost of the tape drive, you need to write about 200 TB. I have about 50 LTO-7 tapes, i.e. about 300 TB of compressed archives, so I have recovered much more than I have paid on a LTO-7 tape drive, 5 years ago. Nevertheless, even if would have written only 100 TB, I would still have bought the tape drive, just for the peace of mind, because after the optical discs became too small I have used HDDs for archival storage, but after a few years in cold storage they become unreliable. If I had not stored duplicates for each HDD, I would have lost a lot of data. Of course, someone who needs to archive just 20 TB or even 40 TB of raw data, can buy just 2 or 4 HDDs and store each file on 2 HDDs and that should be OK. For 100 TB or more of raw data (i.e. 200 TB, when counting the redundancy, because also for tapes you should store at least 2 copies, preferably not in the same location), tapes become cheaper.
  - zitterbewegung 5y ago
    My brother got a cheap LTO tape drive on eBay and he bought a few LTO tapes so I think I bought one off of him for a few dollars more. It’s only a few hundred gigabytes and the tape holds about one terabytes . Note this is my long term cold storage I have backups made on my MacBook Air (hard disk) and my sold MacBook Pro (ssd which I will use on my new 2021 MacBook Pro eventually). I also have backups using blu ray discs and I have one long term storage blu ray that I have been meaning to use
- blue1 5y ago
  iomega stuff was generally rather precarious. LTO drives are solid.
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  Optical discs aren't torn apart when the reader malfunctions?
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/my-cd-shattered-inside-my-cd-rom.290928/ https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/my-cd-shattered-insi... I've had a CD-ROM back in the day shatter on me like this. I'm pretty sure its a common enough story that everyone 'knows' it could happen... but was rare enough that not everyone personally came across it... but I never got to the bottom of it (why it happened, or what conditions led to it). It only ever happened to me once after all. It sounds like x56 speed drives were just too fast for some CD-ROMs. We went from x1 speed in the late 80s to x56 speed by the late 90s, so it makes sense that some CD-ROMs just weren't designed for the speed increase and maybe shatter. Alternatively: maybe some physical damage existed. We beat up CD-ROMs back in the day: storing them in backpacks without protectors and whatever. They were very reliable in terms of reading, but maybe those kinds of mistakes would lead to fractures that would literally blow up on you later. Even then: the most common protector were paper-sleeves, because dust / scratches were what we were most worried about. --------- We used to carry around stronger plastic cases in the early 90s. But by 00s, it was all paper-sleeves. The plastic-cases would themselves shatter when carried around, but the CD-ROMs / DVD-ROMs were stronger, lol.
    - mixmastamyk 5y ago
      Never seen it but have seen many ruined tapes over the years.
    - iypx 5y ago
      I remember my x52 drive would make at least 2 or 3 "test" spins every time I'd insert a disk, just to see how fast it can spin it. It felt like an airplane taking off every time I'd put a new scratch-less disk. I had one year warranty on that drive. This "feature" stopped working exactly one week after my warranty expired, it would just go full speed regardless of how beaten the disks were. That's how I got two of my heavily scratched disks shatter. A few more weeks down the road, the function that's supposed to slow down a disk before a full stop, also stopped working... so now even if a disk was spinning at x52 inside and you'd press the eject button, it would instantly stop the motor and eject it! That's when I finally threw it away and got myself a "normal" x46 or x44 (don't remember) drive...
- adrian_b 5y ago
  They are not fragile in an absolute sense, the poster meant that no matter what tape drive you have, it will break down many years before the tapes written with it would become unreadable. After the tape drive becomes unusable, you may no longer be able to buy another compatible tape drive, because they might be discontinued. For example I am using LTO-7 tapes. For the moment, I do not have to worry, because the current LTO-8 tape drives are able to read my LTO-7 tapes and the same should be true for the future LTO-9 tape drives. However, when LTO-9 tape drives will be the norm, I will have to buy a LTO-9 tape drive and many LTO-9 tapes and copy all my archives, because if I would delay this I would risk to no longer find even LTO-9 tape drives. In that case my tape collection will become unreadable, even if the tapes themselves are guaranteed for at least 30 years. I have already lost many years ago some archives that I had on QIC tape cartridges, because after my tape drive broke I was not able to find any other compatible tape drive.
MayeulC 5y ago
Some have theorized that this is what's behind Amazon Glacier, and that they want to keep it to themselves: https://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bdxl/ https://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bd... I also crave for such cheap storage, perfect for archival/backups, especially when combined with modern snapshotting. HVDs never really materialized, despite being promising, and actually on the market at some point, IIRC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc A lot of other medium were developped, never commercialized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_optical_data_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_optical_data_storage A new optical storage medium is long overdue. This time, it will probably be without support from the media industry.
- jcadam 5y ago
  I'd take an on-prem solution for cheap archival storage any day over Glacier.
  - manquer 5y ago
    With egress costs on s3 that may not be viable if you generate data on the cloud
- fomine3 5y ago
  Is the suspect for Glacier proven?
  - derekp7 5y ago
    I can't see them using optical based on their price structure (compared to bluray media costs per GB). And I doubt they own a manufacturing facility to crank out super-secret multi-terabyte-sized optical disks. However it fits right in with the cost of LTO tapes. Quick back of the envelop: Their web site says 1$ per TB per month starting cost. That is $12/TB per year. A 12 TB LTO-8 tape costs around $70 retail, which puts it at $5.60 per TB. So the cost of the media used to store customer data is paid back in 6 months, or slightly more if they are using parity tapes. That would be my guess, the customer data hits disk first, then gets enough parity and split among enough data centers to hit their reliability target.
willis936 5y ago
In my opinion, it's best to adopt industry practices for home life here. Schofield's 2nd Law of computing comes to mind: if your data doesn't exist in two places, then it doesn't exist anywhere. Offloading reliable backups to companies seems reasonable. It's a lot more money than archiving to physical media, but it's also a lot more reliable. NAS systems also make it easy to have reliable, hot on-site data that keeps a copy of the data backed up to a cloud service. Many of these cloud backup services are also zero-trust.
tomc1985 5y ago
Nooooooooooo, you're supposed to back it up to the cloud and pay some startup jerk $XX/mo for the privilege! [/s]
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  Says whom? Most cloud storage have huge free tiers. I have unlimited storage on telegram.
  - Hamuko 5y ago
    I bet you actually have "unlimited" storage.
    - GhettoComputers 5y ago
      Can you name something that is not "unlimited"? I don't have a limit, I never hit the cap. By that logic nothing is unlimited (texts, calls, data, etc), but realistically it doesn't matter because I don't use it much. I don't care to test it, I use it sparingly and never had a issue with limits.
      - Hamuko 5y ago
        I assume that my S3 bucket is as close to unlimited as it gets.
        GhettoComputers 5y ago
        Its also "unlimited" isn't it? There is no such thing as unlimted. As a subsciption you will also lose it if you stop paying.
        Hamuko 5y ago
        I imagine it's as unlimited as it gets considering the sun is going to explode in some billion of years. However, I have no trust in having "unlimited" storage on a service where I'm not explicitly paying for it.
ksec 5y ago
I have been talking and asking about this for years. And was told about Archival Disc [1] on HN. 500GB per disc right now, and only came out in 2019. 1TB per disc in the future but I suspect not in the next two years. I wish they have a more consumer, or prosumer friendly version though. The current drive goes for about $9K [2] There are Archival BluRay disc that offer 50 + year storage, but they are only in ~50GB per disc. [1] https://panasonic.net/cns/archiver/optical_technology/ https://panasonic.net/cns/archiver/optical_technology/ [2] https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1549175-REG/sony_odsd380u_optical_disc_archive_gen3.html https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1549175-REG/sony_odsd...
- Hamuko 5y ago
  I have very little hope for the price for these things to come down to prosumer levels. The best I can hope for is for local libraries to have one available for use (although you need like 8 hours to fill the 5.5 TB maximum and they're so expensive you don't want to lend them out). However, I have very little hope for that as well since most consumers are just told to use the cloud.
  - ksec 5y ago
    >since most consumers are just told to use the cloud. Yes and I dont like it this trend at all. But it seems we dont have any other way to fight it.
- rambojazz 5y ago
  They remind me of m-discs, which seems to be cheaper as well. How is data stored on those Archival Discs?
mixmastamyk 5y ago
I burn 100GB backups via blu-ray. One or two is enough for my non-movie files. They started stagnating a few years ago when streaming ascended however. Shame as I'd like higher capacity as well. Cheap USB flash drives are already moving into this space. I just got a compact 256GB one for $35 or so, just a matter of time. SD cards would probably be more convenient, but they aren't sadly aren't read in devices like stereos any longer.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  That much music (even at lossless compression that’s a lifetime of nonstop music) is completely impractical to navigate using a common stereo UI
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    Not really, it's about five clicks to start an album, which I'm pretty adept with, and plays for an hour. I have several hundred in Letter/Artist/Year,Album order. Less work than futzing with the radio constantly, which is generally terrible (unless you love tired top-40).
  - bscphil 5y ago
    Assuming you're referring to the parent comment's 100GB drive (or even the 256 GB one) that's really not true. A quick `du -sh` tells me I have right at 100 GB of FLAC music, and I've easily listened to every single track. There are, in fact, only 3770 tracks. At an average of 4.5 minutes a song (guessing), that's only around 11.8 days of music. About 8 hours a day of music for a month! Or to calculate it another way, a typical FLAC stereo track might run about 800 kbps or 100 kB/s. 100 GB will let you store 11.6 days of music at that bitrate, which is just about the same total I got for my collection above.
    - dangravell 5y ago
      To be fair, the parent said "impractical to navigate using a common stereo UI" which doesn't have much to do with the capaciousness of a library, more about how easy it is to browse/search/find/choose what you want. Some stereos have pretty small, monochrome displays. For example this seems to get mentioned a lot in the UK, partly because they are advertised through mainstream channels at older listeners: https://www.brennan.co.uk/ https://www.brennan.co.uk/ Dunno if you call them "common".
kmeisthax 5y ago
The problem is that much of the demand for cheap, shelf-stable backup media has gone away over the last decade or two. Most backup jobs either go to cloud or to disk, not tape. And because of that, tape drives are more expensive than ever, which takes away much of the benefit of the cheap media. LTO, for example, is relegated to archival use-cases nowadays, such as video production. You'd think that would make sense, because the media's shelf stable... but it's actually really awful for archival. Why? Because new drives can't read old tapes past two generations, and old drives stop getting made. So every time a new tape drive generation comes out, a movie studio can't just upgrade drives in their libraries and use the new tapes. Nor can they just hold onto their old drives forever - what happens when they start breaking, and they can't read their old tapes anymore? (Or worse, an old/failing drive eats a tape?) Every movie studio with an archival program is on a constant upgrade treadmill, including costly media migrations. That is, they're copying data from old tapes onto new, so they can maintain compatibility with new drives. This entirely defeats the purpose of shelf-stable media; if I can't buy newly manufactured drives for old tape formats then who cares if the tapes themselves can sit in a box for 20 years? Now, let's say you're not a movie studio with a massive digital archival problem. You just want to backup 5 terabytes. Unfortunately, 5 terabytes is so little that tape vendors have forgotten how to count that low. It's far cheaper (not to mention, more performant) to just buy a bunch of disk drives and migrate data between them. Or just pay Amazon to do it. Which is what everyone wound up doing.
- ghostly_s 5y ago
  > This entirely defeats the purpose of shelf-stable media; if I can't buy newly manufactured drives for old tape formats then who cares if the tapes themselves can sit in a box for 20 years? Why can't you buy new drives for old tape formats? What new features are these new formats providing?
  - throwaway81523 5y ago
    The new formats have higher storage density than the old ones. First generation LTO (LTO-1) stored 100GB on a tape: how much would you pay for a drive like that today? Unsurprisingly, they don't make them any more. LTO drives are read-compatible with tapes from two generations earlier, so you can read LTO-1 tapes on LTO-3 drives, but LTO-3's capacity was 400GB, so no one buys those any more either. The current generation (LTO-8) has 12TB per tape, so you can see the upgrade treadmill chugging along. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Generations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Generations

zitterbewegung 5y ago

Why are tape drives fragile? I use them for my long term backups of personal files I thought they were robust ?

jl6 5y ago
What scale are you working at and how have you made it cost-effective versus a stack of external HDDs?
- adrian_b 5y ago
  I am not that poster, but I also use tapes. One may save about $14 per TB by using tapes instead of external HDDs (which strangely have become cheaper than internal HDDs). In order to recover the cost of the tape drive, you need to write about 200 TB. I have about 50 LTO-7 tapes, i.e. about 300 TB of compressed archives, so I have recovered much more than I have paid on a LTO-7 tape drive, 5 years ago. Nevertheless, even if would have written only 100 TB, I would still have bought the tape drive, just for the peace of mind, because after the optical discs became too small I have used HDDs for archival storage, but after a few years in cold storage they become unreliable. If I had not stored duplicates for each HDD, I would have lost a lot of data. Of course, someone who needs to archive just 20 TB or even 40 TB of raw data, can buy just 2 or 4 HDDs and store each file on 2 HDDs and that should be OK. For 100 TB or more of raw data (i.e. 200 TB, when counting the redundancy, because also for tapes you should store at least 2 copies, preferably not in the same location), tapes become cheaper.
- zitterbewegung 5y ago
  My brother got a cheap LTO tape drive on eBay and he bought a few LTO tapes so I think I bought one off of him for a few dollars more. It’s only a few hundred gigabytes and the tape holds about one terabytes . Note this is my long term cold storage I have backups made on my MacBook Air (hard disk) and my sold MacBook Pro (ssd which I will use on my new 2021 MacBook Pro eventually). I also have backups using blu ray discs and I have one long term storage blu ray that I have been meaning to use
blue1 5y ago
iomega stuff was generally rather precarious. LTO drives are solid.
mixmastamyk 5y ago
Optical discs aren't torn apart when the reader malfunctions?
- dragontamer 5y ago
  https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/my-cd-shattered-inside-my-cd-rom.290928/ https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/my-cd-shattered-insi... I've had a CD-ROM back in the day shatter on me like this. I'm pretty sure its a common enough story that everyone 'knows' it could happen... but was rare enough that not everyone personally came across it... but I never got to the bottom of it (why it happened, or what conditions led to it). It only ever happened to me once after all. It sounds like x56 speed drives were just too fast for some CD-ROMs. We went from x1 speed in the late 80s to x56 speed by the late 90s, so it makes sense that some CD-ROMs just weren't designed for the speed increase and maybe shatter. Alternatively: maybe some physical damage existed. We beat up CD-ROMs back in the day: storing them in backpacks without protectors and whatever. They were very reliable in terms of reading, but maybe those kinds of mistakes would lead to fractures that would literally blow up on you later. Even then: the most common protector were paper-sleeves, because dust / scratches were what we were most worried about. --------- We used to carry around stronger plastic cases in the early 90s. But by 00s, it was all paper-sleeves. The plastic-cases would themselves shatter when carried around, but the CD-ROMs / DVD-ROMs were stronger, lol.
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    Never seen it but have seen many ruined tapes over the years.
  - iypx 5y ago
    I remember my x52 drive would make at least 2 or 3 "test" spins every time I'd insert a disk, just to see how fast it can spin it. It felt like an airplane taking off every time I'd put a new scratch-less disk. I had one year warranty on that drive. This "feature" stopped working exactly one week after my warranty expired, it would just go full speed regardless of how beaten the disks were. That's how I got two of my heavily scratched disks shatter. A few more weeks down the road, the function that's supposed to slow down a disk before a full stop, also stopped working... so now even if a disk was spinning at x52 inside and you'd press the eject button, it would instantly stop the motor and eject it! That's when I finally threw it away and got myself a "normal" x46 or x44 (don't remember) drive...
adrian_b 5y ago
They are not fragile in an absolute sense, the poster meant that no matter what tape drive you have, it will break down many years before the tapes written with it would become unreadable. After the tape drive becomes unusable, you may no longer be able to buy another compatible tape drive, because they might be discontinued. For example I am using LTO-7 tapes. For the moment, I do not have to worry, because the current LTO-8 tape drives are able to read my LTO-7 tapes and the same should be true for the future LTO-9 tape drives. However, when LTO-9 tape drives will be the norm, I will have to buy a LTO-9 tape drive and many LTO-9 tapes and copy all my archives, because if I would delay this I would risk to no longer find even LTO-9 tape drives. In that case my tape collection will become unreadable, even if the tapes themselves are guaranteed for at least 30 years. I have already lost many years ago some archives that I had on QIC tape cartridges, because after my tape drive broke I was not able to find any other compatible tape drive.

MayeulC 5y ago

Some have theorized that this is what's behind Amazon Glacier, and that they want to keep it to themselves: https://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bdxl/ https://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bd... I also crave for such cheap storage, perfect for archival/backups, especially when combined with modern snapshotting. HVDs never really materialized, despite being promising, and actually on the market at some point, IIRC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc A lot of other medium were developped, never commercialized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_optical_data_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_optical_data_storage A new optical storage medium is long overdue. This time, it will probably be without support from the media industry.

jcadam 5y ago
I'd take an on-prem solution for cheap archival storage any day over Glacier.
- manquer 5y ago
  With egress costs on s3 that may not be viable if you generate data on the cloud
fomine3 5y ago
Is the suspect for Glacier proven?
- derekp7 5y ago
  I can't see them using optical based on their price structure (compared to bluray media costs per GB). And I doubt they own a manufacturing facility to crank out super-secret multi-terabyte-sized optical disks. However it fits right in with the cost of LTO tapes. Quick back of the envelop: Their web site says 1$ per TB per month starting cost. That is $12/TB per year. A 12 TB LTO-8 tape costs around $70 retail, which puts it at $5.60 per TB. So the cost of the media used to store customer data is paid back in 6 months, or slightly more if they are using parity tapes. That would be my guess, the customer data hits disk first, then gets enough parity and split among enough data centers to hit their reliability target.

willis936 5y ago

In my opinion, it's best to adopt industry practices for home life here. Schofield's 2nd Law of computing comes to mind: if your data doesn't exist in two places, then it doesn't exist anywhere. Offloading reliable backups to companies seems reasonable. It's a lot more money than archiving to physical media, but it's also a lot more reliable. NAS systems also make it easy to have reliable, hot on-site data that keeps a copy of the data backed up to a cloud service. Many of these cloud backup services are also zero-trust.

tomc1985 5y ago

Nooooooooooo, you're supposed to back it up to the cloud and pay some startup jerk $XX/mo for the privilege! [/s]

GhettoComputers 5y ago
Says whom? Most cloud storage have huge free tiers. I have unlimited storage on telegram.
- Hamuko 5y ago
  I bet you actually have "unlimited" storage.
  - GhettoComputers 5y ago
    Can you name something that is not "unlimited"? I don't have a limit, I never hit the cap. By that logic nothing is unlimited (texts, calls, data, etc), but realistically it doesn't matter because I don't use it much. I don't care to test it, I use it sparingly and never had a issue with limits.
    - Hamuko 5y ago
      I assume that my S3 bucket is as close to unlimited as it gets.
      - GhettoComputers 5y ago
        Its also "unlimited" isn't it? There is no such thing as unlimted. As a subsciption you will also lose it if you stop paying.
        Hamuko 5y ago
        I imagine it's as unlimited as it gets considering the sun is going to explode in some billion of years. However, I have no trust in having "unlimited" storage on a service where I'm not explicitly paying for it.

ksec 5y ago

I have been talking and asking about this for years. And was told about Archival Disc [1] on HN. 500GB per disc right now, and only came out in 2019. 1TB per disc in the future but I suspect not in the next two years. I wish they have a more consumer, or prosumer friendly version though. The current drive goes for about $9K [2] There are Archival BluRay disc that offer 50 + year storage, but they are only in ~50GB per disc. [1] https://panasonic.net/cns/archiver/optical_technology/ https://panasonic.net/cns/archiver/optical_technology/ [2] https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1549175-REG/sony_odsd380u_optical_disc_archive_gen3.html https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1549175-REG/sony_odsd...

Hamuko 5y ago
I have very little hope for the price for these things to come down to prosumer levels. The best I can hope for is for local libraries to have one available for use (although you need like 8 hours to fill the 5.5 TB maximum and they're so expensive you don't want to lend them out). However, I have very little hope for that as well since most consumers are just told to use the cloud.
- ksec 5y ago
  >since most consumers are just told to use the cloud. Yes and I dont like it this trend at all. But it seems we dont have any other way to fight it.
rambojazz 5y ago
They remind me of m-discs, which seems to be cheaper as well. How is data stored on those Archival Discs?

mixmastamyk 5y ago

I burn 100GB backups via blu-ray. One or two is enough for my non-movie files. They started stagnating a few years ago when streaming ascended however. Shame as I'd like higher capacity as well. Cheap USB flash drives are already moving into this space. I just got a compact 256GB one for $35 or so, just a matter of time. SD cards would probably be more convenient, but they aren't sadly aren't read in devices like stereos any longer.

rbanffy 5y ago
That much music (even at lossless compression that’s a lifetime of nonstop music) is completely impractical to navigate using a common stereo UI
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  Not really, it's about five clicks to start an album, which I'm pretty adept with, and plays for an hour. I have several hundred in Letter/Artist/Year,Album order. Less work than futzing with the radio constantly, which is generally terrible (unless you love tired top-40).
- bscphil 5y ago
  Assuming you're referring to the parent comment's 100GB drive (or even the 256 GB one) that's really not true. A quick `du -sh` tells me I have right at 100 GB of FLAC music, and I've easily listened to every single track. There are, in fact, only 3770 tracks. At an average of 4.5 minutes a song (guessing), that's only around 11.8 days of music. About 8 hours a day of music for a month! Or to calculate it another way, a typical FLAC stereo track might run about 800 kbps or 100 kB/s. 100 GB will let you store 11.6 days of music at that bitrate, which is just about the same total I got for my collection above.
  - dangravell 5y ago
    To be fair, the parent said "impractical to navigate using a common stereo UI" which doesn't have much to do with the capaciousness of a library, more about how easy it is to browse/search/find/choose what you want. Some stereos have pretty small, monochrome displays. For example this seems to get mentioned a lot in the UK, partly because they are advertised through mainstream channels at older listeners: https://www.brennan.co.uk/ https://www.brennan.co.uk/ Dunno if you call them "common".

kmeisthax 5y ago

The problem is that much of the demand for cheap, shelf-stable backup media has gone away over the last decade or two. Most backup jobs either go to cloud or to disk, not tape. And because of that, tape drives are more expensive than ever, which takes away much of the benefit of the cheap media. LTO, for example, is relegated to archival use-cases nowadays, such as video production. You'd think that would make sense, because the media's shelf stable... but it's actually really awful for archival. Why? Because new drives can't read old tapes past two generations, and old drives stop getting made. So every time a new tape drive generation comes out, a movie studio can't just upgrade drives in their libraries and use the new tapes. Nor can they just hold onto their old drives forever - what happens when they start breaking, and they can't read their old tapes anymore? (Or worse, an old/failing drive eats a tape?) Every movie studio with an archival program is on a constant upgrade treadmill, including costly media migrations. That is, they're copying data from old tapes onto new, so they can maintain compatibility with new drives. This entirely defeats the purpose of shelf-stable media; if I can't buy newly manufactured drives for old tape formats then who cares if the tapes themselves can sit in a box for 20 years? Now, let's say you're not a movie studio with a massive digital archival problem. You just want to backup 5 terabytes. Unfortunately, 5 terabytes is so little that tape vendors have forgotten how to count that low. It's far cheaper (not to mention, more performant) to just buy a bunch of disk drives and migrate data between them. Or just pay Amazon to do it. Which is what everyone wound up doing.

ghostly_s 5y ago
> This entirely defeats the purpose of shelf-stable media; if I can't buy newly manufactured drives for old tape formats then who cares if the tapes themselves can sit in a box for 20 years? Why can't you buy new drives for old tape formats? What new features are these new formats providing?
- throwaway81523 5y ago
  The new formats have higher storage density than the old ones. First generation LTO (LTO-1) stored 100GB on a tape: how much would you pay for a drive like that today? Unsurprisingly, they don't make them any more. LTO drives are read-compatible with tapes from two generations earlier, so you can read LTO-1 tapes on LTO-3 drives, but LTO-3's capacity was 400GB, so no one buys those any more either. The current generation (LTO-8) has 12TB per tape, so you can see the upgrade treadmill chugging along. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Generations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Generations