I used to work in the bulk storage industry and the running joke from 2005 until 2018 when I left was "surely this is the year tape will become obsolete". Cold

I used to work in the bulk storage industry and the running joke from 2005 until 2018 when I left was "surely this is the year tape will become obsolete". Cold tier cloud storage absolutely has tape behind it. You can even send tapes to some cloud vendors. Broadcasting is another giant customer. Companies like WBD have Exabytes or Zettabytes of digitized programming (movies, series, documentaries) which would be impractical to store on disk. The typical workflow is for the program scheduler to direct the robot to fetch the tape containing a program 24 hours in advance of the broadcast time and copy it to disk, then erasing the disk copy after broadcast.