14 ms·

I'm not sure about currently, but up until very recently, the IRS did offsite backups by sending trucks full of tapes down the interstate.

• fragmede 2mo ago
  ...how else would you do it? The Internet is only so fast and if you don't care about latency that's what you'd do.
  • annzabelle 2mo ago
    I guess I found the storage medium dated. Though, my understanding is that certain kinds of tapes are much better for true archival storage than HDDs or SSDs.
    • toast0 2mo ago
      Plenty of modern tapes. LTO-10 came out last year with 30TB tapes and 40TB tapes came out Jan 2026. IBM has a propetary tape system with 50TB in a slightly larger format, that came out in 2023. The drives are spendy, but $/TB on media is lower than anything else. 30-50TB tapes are still pretty expensive, but so is all storage these days (I hadn't really looked in a while, yikes)
      • unsnap_biceps 2mo ago
        Tape prices are lower, but the drive cost is very outsized. The cheapest drive on B&H is $13,584.05
        • Dylan16807 2mo ago
          The cheapest LTO-10 drive. They have LTO-8 drives for less than half that price. And LTO-8 tapes are significantly cheaper per TB because they're not brand new. For some reason they also have an LTO-5 drive for $1200 and tapes for $20/TB. Which looks a lot better today in a comparison with hard drives than it did a year ago.
        • toast0 2mo ago
          Yeah, I said they're spendy... But if you're filling trucks with tapes, the cost of the drive(s) will amortize pretty well.