5 ms·

Ok, it sucks, losing data always sucks, but what ever happened to the 3-2-1 backup rule? even if your off site backup provider goes tits up, your on site backup

Ok, it sucks, losing data always sucks, but what ever happened to the 3-2-1 backup rule? even if your off site backup provider goes tits up, your on site backup is still there. If you don't want on site, a second off site provider, 50TB on backblaze would be an extra ~$350 per month (prob less if they were to commit to capacity instead of using their PAYG service)

embedding-shape 2mo ago
> but what ever happened to the 3-2-1 backup rule? I wasn't 100% sure, but the data backs this up[0]; the "3-2-1 backup rule" is a relatively modern concept, at least by that name. I also remember things like "have one backup in one place, another in another place" since before this mnemonic, but I feel like it's unfair to judge a 70+ years archive on something that just recently actually became a widespread mantra. - [0] Interestingly, Ngram (https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%5B3-2-1+backup+rule%5D&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=1 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%5B3-2-1+backu...) says ~2010 while Trends (https://trends.google.com/explore?q=3-2-1%2520backup%2520rule&date=all&geo=Worldwide https://trends.google.com/explore?q=3-2-1%2520backup%2520rul...) says slow build up from ~2020, guess "everyday" language would sit somewhere around those two different truths.
- olyjohn 2mo ago
  This has been a rule for like 30+ years (I have only been in the industry that long). Whether it was called "3-2-1" before that or not, the practice is the same. Have an onsite backup, have an offsite backup. This isn't a new concept at all.
  - dylan604 2mo ago
    Your description leaves the reader wanting. You make it sound like having a backup on an HDD in one location and then having another copy on the exact same make/model HDD in another location is a-okay. What if the vendor had a defect that strike the make/model of HDD used?
    - Dylan16807 2mo ago
      That's pretty unlikely, but even if it does happen to be a 3TB Seagate or something you'll be pretty safe. The offsite backup is probably offline so no drives are failing, the onsite backup is still pretty likely to survive, and you have the originals.
      - dylan604 2mo ago
        You say that to someone that has personally brought up 4 16-drive 4RU units on a Friday with brand new drives and then left over the weekend to complete the striping and an initial warm up process of writing/deleting files to the array. When I arrive on Monday, multiple drives in each enclosure had failed which meant not data recovery would have been possible. Luckily, it was during the warm up and not 2 weeks later after being active. After contacting our vendor, all drives were replaced not just those that failed. Later discovered that it was a manufacturer issue, and multiple other clients of our vendor had similar experiences. While statistically it might equate to "unlikely" as you state, the fact it did happen, I now have that experience that is not forgotten. Never bring a large storage pool into PROD immediately after the array finishes striping. Put it under load for a period of time first. The question remains on how long that period is though which is probably answered with "how paranoid are you"
        Dylan16807 2mo ago
        > Luckily, it was during the warm up and not 2 weeks later after being active. While there's always luck involved, dying during warmup and not two weeks later is the expected experience for drives that defective. So what happened to you wasn't that you made a backup and then it failed so fast you couldn't use it. It's relevant to what I was saying is unlikely, but it's not an example of it. Plus at zero weeks or even two weeks you have the previous backup system around. If you have a big simultaneous failure 6 months out, that's a scary situation, but that's much rarer.
- Crosseye_Jack 2mo ago
  The 3-2-1 rule is ~20years old at this point. But just because an archive is "old" doesn't mean we can't apply modern standards to that archive as time marches on, otherwise the BM_ARC would have never been build and opened a couple of years ago. I mean, that 70+ year old archive must have been digitised at some point, unless Iron Mountain was storing the reel to reel tapes and/or film from the original recordings. So some "modernation" has been applied to it since its creation.
  - Melatonic 2mo ago
    Wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't digitised. TV was using BetacamXR up until very recently (and still might be). Tape is pretty reliable and lasts awhile. Now add in tons of other legacy formats and digitising becomes a pretty big cost for a public station.
- BeetleB 2mo ago
  > the "3-2-1 backup rule" is a relatively modern concept, at least by that name. I also remember things like "have one backup in one place, another in another place" since before this mnemonic, but I feel like it's unfair to judge a 70+ years archive on something that just recently actually became a widespread mantra. They signed up with them in 2019. Not long ago. Even if it is a "new" concept, common sense isn't. Pretty much anyone who cares about their data will do the due diligence, and this is not something that requires technical chops. This has been a concern for well over 20 years! It really sounds like some senior management trying to be cheap.
  - jrochkind1 2mo ago
    It is definitely not having sufficient budget, although I doubt management was "trying" to be cheap. They probably have 1-2 IT staff, who have been paid significantly under market value compared to private sector. Management was not management of an IT organization, and probably did not really understand the trade-offs or what they'd lose by not spending more money on IT. Their IT staff was probably super busy and over-worked and also (not to throw them under the bus) not experienced enough to really advise them, and if they had and had tried to advise them, would management have decided that doing less programmatic work to pay for it, and having IT people at least temporarily spend less time on whatever they do to support regular business, to set up and support backups, was worth it? Maybe, maybe not. Again, the managers probably have little experience with IT. The whole organization is probably well under 100 people. Source: I work in non-profits. Why is HN always focused on suggesting there's a person who could have easily made the right choice if they weren't an idiot?
    - BeetleB 2mo ago
      You say management was not being cheap, and then list everything cheap management does. I'm familiar with the dynamics of such places. If they actually go through a proper lawsuit, my guess is the lawyers will cost more than whatever they'd have to pay for redundant backups by an order of magnitude. Which means they probably won't go to court.
      - 2mo ago
- bityard 2mo ago
  I can pretty clearly remember hearing about the "3-2-1 backup rule" by name 10 or 15 years ago on the Security Now podcast with Steve Gibson. So it is _at least_ that old, but probably even older. The concept of having multiple backups is not at all new, however. Since I've been involved with computers (~30 years), I have heard folks say things like "two is one, one is none" in reference to backups and data replication in general. Also, this TV station has not been sending their show archives to Iron Mountain for the past 70 years. Probably what happened was: In 2019, they had an on-site or nearby archive. Then some enterprising IT director came along and convinced management that they would save a bunch of money and time by outsourcing everything to a third party who said they could do it for cheap. Very confident in their genius, they then scrapped their own archive entirely. Part of me pities them for ending up in this situation, the other part of me believes they got everything they asked for.
  - wlesieutre 2mo ago
    The rule I always remember hearing is “however many backups you think you have, you have one less” Which is not as thorough, but still makes the point that you should do more than one backup
    - pavel_lishin 2mo ago
      Two is one, and one is none.
  - bothers 2mo ago
    > Probably what happened was: Probably! The important part is that your pretend story time supports your base desire to blame the victim!
- layer8 2mo ago
  The concept of multiple copies in multiple locations already existed when backups on CD-R were common, so 20+ years ago. The “2” in the 3-2-1 rule refers to using different physical storage media and predates cloud storage.
- supriyo-biswas 2mo ago
  > I also remember things like "have one backup in one place, another in another place" since before this mnemonic I've heard variations of this all the way back to some 1990s vocational IT courses in the country I live, and it wasn't even technologically advanced at the time. It's hard to have any sympathy for someone who misses this concept in today's age.
- xtajv 2mo ago
  I'm under the impression that "two is one and one is none" is old military slang.
- dwattttt 2mo ago
  Redundant backups arranged to survive things like "building burns down" or a natural disaster predate digital backups.
- PeterStuer 2mo ago
  Maybe the catchy name, but the practice was very much there in the 1980's.
lenerdenator 2mo ago
It's worth noting that PBS affiliates are non-profits that have fairly constrained budgets, especially now that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been dissolved due to DOGE. Non-profit IT has always seemed, to me at least, to be a land of compromises. There's rarely enough money, knowledge, or time to do things "the right way", so you have to do the best you can. If I could only choose one backup to have, it'd be remote on a provider like Iron Mountain. It would seem as if they are storing things on Iron Mountain through an intermediary company, who may or may not have actually paid the bill. So, y'know, fraud's a possibility here.
- Mistletoe 2mo ago
  [flagged]
  - WorldMaker 2mo ago
    It's nice to know that even in the end the CPB lived up to its mission and promise and swallowed its poison pill rather than be corrupted by partisan politics, but it's also gross to have seen that forewarned poison pill needed in my lifetime. There's some hope that we can still find the next Mr. Rogers to put a heart on a sleeve in front of some future Congress and build a sequel CPB with similar strong core principles.
    - ameliaquining 2mo ago
      The U.S. was way less politically polarized back then.
      - LogicFailsMe 2mo ago
        I think we were just as polarized, if not more so, but we didn't have 24/7 ragebait egging us on to fight some more to drive up the engagement numbers. It's like someone watched the Star Trek ToS episode "Day of The Dove" and thought it was a great idea for a startup. But also, that was 1968, plus sa change and all that...
basch 2mo ago
From the article: It's not clear if the channel has backups of its data, but based on its determination, we suspect not. This is strange, though, especially for a major organization, as one can easily purchase a six-bay NAS on Amazon and populate it with the best HDDs. This also goes against the 3-2-1 backup rule, which says you should keep three copies of your files stored in two different mediums, with one of them running offsite. Hopefully Nine PBS will implement a better backup system once it regains access to its data.
- kmeisthax 2mo ago
  A different article about this (which I believe you're quoting) states Nine PBS has about 50TB in limbo, which actually smacks me as kind of small. I had written up an entire screed about the problems with archival[0] and how Hollywood is getting hit with huge costs to maintain LTO tape libraries; because when you get to the PB scale doing this correctly becomes nontrivial and outsourcing to a specialist is genuinely a safer bet. I genuinely have more data to lose than they do. At 50TB, they probably could have Just™ written three copies of the data to a pile of disks, sent one copy off to Iron Mountain, and kept the other two copies unplugged in a safe. I can understand the DIY solution might not be allowed for insurance reasons, but it's something so cheap they probably could have done both. Unless OSS was just taking them for a ride on storage, which... well, actually that seems pretty likely. [0] To put it simply, there is no good medium for the archival of digital information. HDDs are not shelf-stable. Flash is even less shelf-stable than disk. Sony is actively trying to kill optical. LTO is shelf-stable, but good luck buying known-good or new drives for old formats. The only option is periodic cloning and verification of offline disks, or keeping all your disks online, which is the NAS solution.
dredmorbius 2mo ago
The backups (and servers) seem to still exist, but KETC's vendor is estranged with its own hosting / siting provider, Iron Mountain, which is a going concern. IM seem to be holding KETC's data hostage, which is Not Cool.
- scosman 2mo ago
  It's not that simple. If I'm a host and someone shows up without the keys or passwords and says "that's my data, I was a client of a client of yours", I have no idea how to tell if that's true and no idea how to deliver the data. Maybe they mixed data from many companies on the same volume like S3 does. Maybe there were ACLs on that. Maybe it includes PII. Maybe it's a bunch of shards and needs an index on OSS servers to reassemble. Maybe it's encrypted by keys OSS had.
  - dredmorbius 2mo ago
    1. If you're hosting third-parties at scale (as in: more than one), you'll have procedures for validating ownership and access. 2. That doesn't actually seem to be Iron Mountain's argument here, though the reporting isn't crystal on the point.
    - compiler-guy 2mo ago
      For the first level customers, sure. But their customers’ customers? Almost certainly not. There is no way for Iron Mountain to determine who OSS’s customers are, and their permissions, without help from OSS itself. And because OSS is defunct, they can’t get that help.
    - vel0city 2mo ago
      So imagine I decide to make some tool to let my customers store their files. I just decide to toss them all in a big fat S3 bucket behind the scenes with what look like random UUIDs for the keys in the bucket. All the relationships between whose files are whose are in some other database not hosted on AWS. How does AWS then determine which files are whose when my angry clients go knocking on their doors because I've decided to disappear?
phire 2mo ago
I’m not sure this is the only copy of the data. Sounds like they paid a company to digitise all their old tapes, and store the results. They possibly still have all the tapes (on site) and are just trying to avoid paying the costs to redigitise them. But, it’s also quite likely they destroyed all original the tapes after digitisation, and this was the only copy.
- account42 2mo ago
  Tapes decay so it would still be irresponsible to have only one copy of the digitized versions. It's still possible that they have other copies though that are just harder to access.
  - Tangurena2 2mo ago
    NASA stored all the data from space missions on tape - those old reel to reel mag tapes like you see in old SF movies. Decades of using floor buffers ended up erasing the bottom 2 rows of tapes. https://www.ibm.com/history/magnetic-tape https://www.ibm.com/history/magnetic-tape Usually what kills the tape is the little reflective stickers on the back side of the tape material will fall off and render the tape useless since the machinery can't tell where the recording starts. Apparently I bought cheap mag tapes back then.

embedding-shape 2mo ago

> but what ever happened to the 3-2-1 backup rule? I wasn't 100% sure, but the data backs this up[0]; the "3-2-1 backup rule" is a relatively modern concept, at least by that name. I also remember things like "have one backup in one place, another in another place" since before this mnemonic, but I feel like it's unfair to judge a 70+ years archive on something that just recently actually became a widespread mantra. - [0] Interestingly, Ngram (https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%5B3-2-1+backup+rule%5D&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=1 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%5B3-2-1+backu...) says ~2010 while Trends (https://trends.google.com/explore?q=3-2-1%2520backup%2520rule&date=all&geo=Worldwide https://trends.google.com/explore?q=3-2-1%2520backup%2520rul...) says slow build up from ~2020, guess "everyday" language would sit somewhere around those two different truths.

olyjohn 2mo ago
This has been a rule for like 30+ years (I have only been in the industry that long). Whether it was called "3-2-1" before that or not, the practice is the same. Have an onsite backup, have an offsite backup. This isn't a new concept at all.
- dylan604 2mo ago
  Your description leaves the reader wanting. You make it sound like having a backup on an HDD in one location and then having another copy on the exact same make/model HDD in another location is a-okay. What if the vendor had a defect that strike the make/model of HDD used?
  - Dylan16807 2mo ago
    That's pretty unlikely, but even if it does happen to be a 3TB Seagate or something you'll be pretty safe. The offsite backup is probably offline so no drives are failing, the onsite backup is still pretty likely to survive, and you have the originals.
    - dylan604 2mo ago
      You say that to someone that has personally brought up 4 16-drive 4RU units on a Friday with brand new drives and then left over the weekend to complete the striping and an initial warm up process of writing/deleting files to the array. When I arrive on Monday, multiple drives in each enclosure had failed which meant not data recovery would have been possible. Luckily, it was during the warm up and not 2 weeks later after being active. After contacting our vendor, all drives were replaced not just those that failed. Later discovered that it was a manufacturer issue, and multiple other clients of our vendor had similar experiences. While statistically it might equate to "unlikely" as you state, the fact it did happen, I now have that experience that is not forgotten. Never bring a large storage pool into PROD immediately after the array finishes striping. Put it under load for a period of time first. The question remains on how long that period is though which is probably answered with "how paranoid are you"
      - Dylan16807 2mo ago
        > Luckily, it was during the warm up and not 2 weeks later after being active. While there's always luck involved, dying during warmup and not two weeks later is the expected experience for drives that defective. So what happened to you wasn't that you made a backup and then it failed so fast you couldn't use it. It's relevant to what I was saying is unlikely, but it's not an example of it. Plus at zero weeks or even two weeks you have the previous backup system around. If you have a big simultaneous failure 6 months out, that's a scary situation, but that's much rarer.
Crosseye_Jack 2mo ago
The 3-2-1 rule is ~20years old at this point. But just because an archive is "old" doesn't mean we can't apply modern standards to that archive as time marches on, otherwise the BM_ARC would have never been build and opened a couple of years ago. I mean, that 70+ year old archive must have been digitised at some point, unless Iron Mountain was storing the reel to reel tapes and/or film from the original recordings. So some "modernation" has been applied to it since its creation.
- Melatonic 2mo ago
  Wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't digitised. TV was using BetacamXR up until very recently (and still might be). Tape is pretty reliable and lasts awhile. Now add in tons of other legacy formats and digitising becomes a pretty big cost for a public station.
BeetleB 2mo ago
> the "3-2-1 backup rule" is a relatively modern concept, at least by that name. I also remember things like "have one backup in one place, another in another place" since before this mnemonic, but I feel like it's unfair to judge a 70+ years archive on something that just recently actually became a widespread mantra. They signed up with them in 2019. Not long ago. Even if it is a "new" concept, common sense isn't. Pretty much anyone who cares about their data will do the due diligence, and this is not something that requires technical chops. This has been a concern for well over 20 years! It really sounds like some senior management trying to be cheap.
- jrochkind1 2mo ago
  It is definitely not having sufficient budget, although I doubt management was "trying" to be cheap. They probably have 1-2 IT staff, who have been paid significantly under market value compared to private sector. Management was not management of an IT organization, and probably did not really understand the trade-offs or what they'd lose by not spending more money on IT. Their IT staff was probably super busy and over-worked and also (not to throw them under the bus) not experienced enough to really advise them, and if they had and had tried to advise them, would management have decided that doing less programmatic work to pay for it, and having IT people at least temporarily spend less time on whatever they do to support regular business, to set up and support backups, was worth it? Maybe, maybe not. Again, the managers probably have little experience with IT. The whole organization is probably well under 100 people. Source: I work in non-profits. Why is HN always focused on suggesting there's a person who could have easily made the right choice if they weren't an idiot?
  - BeetleB 2mo ago
    You say management was not being cheap, and then list everything cheap management does. I'm familiar with the dynamics of such places. If they actually go through a proper lawsuit, my guess is the lawyers will cost more than whatever they'd have to pay for redundant backups by an order of magnitude. Which means they probably won't go to court.
    - 2mo ago
bityard 2mo ago
I can pretty clearly remember hearing about the "3-2-1 backup rule" by name 10 or 15 years ago on the Security Now podcast with Steve Gibson. So it is _at least_ that old, but probably even older. The concept of having multiple backups is not at all new, however. Since I've been involved with computers (~30 years), I have heard folks say things like "two is one, one is none" in reference to backups and data replication in general. Also, this TV station has not been sending their show archives to Iron Mountain for the past 70 years. Probably what happened was: In 2019, they had an on-site or nearby archive. Then some enterprising IT director came along and convinced management that they would save a bunch of money and time by outsourcing everything to a third party who said they could do it for cheap. Very confident in their genius, they then scrapped their own archive entirely. Part of me pities them for ending up in this situation, the other part of me believes they got everything they asked for.
- wlesieutre 2mo ago
  The rule I always remember hearing is “however many backups you think you have, you have one less” Which is not as thorough, but still makes the point that you should do more than one backup
  - pavel_lishin 2mo ago
    Two is one, and one is none.
- bothers 2mo ago
  > Probably what happened was: Probably! The important part is that your pretend story time supports your base desire to blame the victim!
layer8 2mo ago
The concept of multiple copies in multiple locations already existed when backups on CD-R were common, so 20+ years ago. The “2” in the 3-2-1 rule refers to using different physical storage media and predates cloud storage.
supriyo-biswas 2mo ago
> I also remember things like "have one backup in one place, another in another place" since before this mnemonic I've heard variations of this all the way back to some 1990s vocational IT courses in the country I live, and it wasn't even technologically advanced at the time. It's hard to have any sympathy for someone who misses this concept in today's age.
xtajv 2mo ago
I'm under the impression that "two is one and one is none" is old military slang.
dwattttt 2mo ago
Redundant backups arranged to survive things like "building burns down" or a natural disaster predate digital backups.
PeterStuer 2mo ago
Maybe the catchy name, but the practice was very much there in the 1980's.

lenerdenator 2mo ago

It's worth noting that PBS affiliates are non-profits that have fairly constrained budgets, especially now that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been dissolved due to DOGE. Non-profit IT has always seemed, to me at least, to be a land of compromises. There's rarely enough money, knowledge, or time to do things "the right way", so you have to do the best you can. If I could only choose one backup to have, it'd be remote on a provider like Iron Mountain. It would seem as if they are storing things on Iron Mountain through an intermediary company, who may or may not have actually paid the bill. So, y'know, fraud's a possibility here.

Mistletoe 2mo ago
[flagged]
- WorldMaker 2mo ago
  It's nice to know that even in the end the CPB lived up to its mission and promise and swallowed its poison pill rather than be corrupted by partisan politics, but it's also gross to have seen that forewarned poison pill needed in my lifetime. There's some hope that we can still find the next Mr. Rogers to put a heart on a sleeve in front of some future Congress and build a sequel CPB with similar strong core principles.
  - ameliaquining 2mo ago
    The U.S. was way less politically polarized back then.
    - LogicFailsMe 2mo ago
      I think we were just as polarized, if not more so, but we didn't have 24/7 ragebait egging us on to fight some more to drive up the engagement numbers. It's like someone watched the Star Trek ToS episode "Day of The Dove" and thought it was a great idea for a startup. But also, that was 1968, plus sa change and all that...

basch 2mo ago

From the article: It's not clear if the channel has backups of its data, but based on its determination, we suspect not. This is strange, though, especially for a major organization, as one can easily purchase a six-bay NAS on Amazon and populate it with the best HDDs. This also goes against the 3-2-1 backup rule, which says you should keep three copies of your files stored in two different mediums, with one of them running offsite. Hopefully Nine PBS will implement a better backup system once it regains access to its data.

kmeisthax 2mo ago
A different article about this (which I believe you're quoting) states Nine PBS has about 50TB in limbo, which actually smacks me as kind of small. I had written up an entire screed about the problems with archival[0] and how Hollywood is getting hit with huge costs to maintain LTO tape libraries; because when you get to the PB scale doing this correctly becomes nontrivial and outsourcing to a specialist is genuinely a safer bet. I genuinely have more data to lose than they do. At 50TB, they probably could have Just™ written three copies of the data to a pile of disks, sent one copy off to Iron Mountain, and kept the other two copies unplugged in a safe. I can understand the DIY solution might not be allowed for insurance reasons, but it's something so cheap they probably could have done both. Unless OSS was just taking them for a ride on storage, which... well, actually that seems pretty likely. [0] To put it simply, there is no good medium for the archival of digital information. HDDs are not shelf-stable. Flash is even less shelf-stable than disk. Sony is actively trying to kill optical. LTO is shelf-stable, but good luck buying known-good or new drives for old formats. The only option is periodic cloning and verification of offline disks, or keeping all your disks online, which is the NAS solution.

dredmorbius 2mo ago

The backups (and servers) seem to still exist, but KETC's vendor is estranged with its own hosting / siting provider, Iron Mountain, which is a going concern. IM seem to be holding KETC's data hostage, which is Not Cool.

scosman 2mo ago
It's not that simple. If I'm a host and someone shows up without the keys or passwords and says "that's my data, I was a client of a client of yours", I have no idea how to tell if that's true and no idea how to deliver the data. Maybe they mixed data from many companies on the same volume like S3 does. Maybe there were ACLs on that. Maybe it includes PII. Maybe it's a bunch of shards and needs an index on OSS servers to reassemble. Maybe it's encrypted by keys OSS had.
- dredmorbius 2mo ago
  1. If you're hosting third-parties at scale (as in: more than one), you'll have procedures for validating ownership and access. 2. That doesn't actually seem to be Iron Mountain's argument here, though the reporting isn't crystal on the point.
  - compiler-guy 2mo ago
    For the first level customers, sure. But their customers’ customers? Almost certainly not. There is no way for Iron Mountain to determine who OSS’s customers are, and their permissions, without help from OSS itself. And because OSS is defunct, they can’t get that help.
  - vel0city 2mo ago
    So imagine I decide to make some tool to let my customers store their files. I just decide to toss them all in a big fat S3 bucket behind the scenes with what look like random UUIDs for the keys in the bucket. All the relationships between whose files are whose are in some other database not hosted on AWS. How does AWS then determine which files are whose when my angry clients go knocking on their doors because I've decided to disappear?

phire 2mo ago

I’m not sure this is the only copy of the data. Sounds like they paid a company to digitise all their old tapes, and store the results. They possibly still have all the tapes (on site) and are just trying to avoid paying the costs to redigitise them. But, it’s also quite likely they destroyed all original the tapes after digitisation, and this was the only copy.

account42 2mo ago
Tapes decay so it would still be irresponsible to have only one copy of the digitized versions. It's still possible that they have other copies though that are just harder to access.
- Tangurena2 2mo ago
  NASA stored all the data from space missions on tape - those old reel to reel mag tapes like you see in old SF movies. Decades of using floor buffers ended up erasing the bottom 2 rows of tapes. https://www.ibm.com/history/magnetic-tape https://www.ibm.com/history/magnetic-tape Usually what kills the tape is the little reflective stickers on the back side of the tape material will fall off and render the tape useless since the machinery can't tell where the recording starts. Apparently I bought cheap mag tapes back then.