4 ms·

I've heard good old magnetic tapes (LTO nowadays) are the medium of choice for long-term storage within large organizations.

• thfuran 3y ago
  The drives are expensive and the tapes are pretty much only useable for offline storage and not for keeping the data accessible.
  • lisasays 3y ago
    Pretty much only useable for offline storage and not for keeping the data accessible. Which is pretty much what is meant by "long-term archival storage".
    • xupybd 3y ago
      Yeah that is what I was looking for.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
• dehrmann 3y ago
  What's the oldest tape a drive still in production can read?
  • wmf 3y ago
    It's not good. For example, LTO-9 drives can only read back to LTO-7. If you want to read a 20-year-old tape you'd need a ~15-year-old drive.
  • __d 3y ago
    In extremis, you need to archive the means of reading the data as well. This is more true the less standard your media is: 1600bps tape using Unix tar format is much easier to read today than some 1990's commercial backup program on some proprietary, hardware compression implementation using some oddball tape-in-cartridge media. You still have issues with, eg. melted rubber on tape rollers, leaking capacitors, etc, etc, but that's a more tractable problem than finding the right weirdo media reader 50 (or 100, or whatever) years after it was obsolete.