5 ms·

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.