alt Hacker NewsNot sure if they're still doing this, but as of a few years ago, the IRS was still using literal trucks full of tapes to transport data to backup facilities. Tapes are good for this because they don't degrade as quickly as hard drives, so if you're actually looking to do archival storage that will outlast the cloud provider of the decade, they are surprisingly practical.
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rcbdev • yesterday at 6:11 AM
Working with tape storage was part of my high school education. So was mainframe job scheduling...
Europe is as much ahead as it is behind.
DANmode • last Monday at 10:32 PM
Does tape still burn really easily?
Or has that been fixed?
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As long as the janitors aren't using electric floor buffers, like NASA used to do, the tapes will last forever. However NASA ended up losing the data (from 1960s space missions) on the bottom 2 rows of tapes. It took a couple decades though.
Example of those mag tapes: https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/memory-storage/8/...
How they were stored: https://www.hewlettpackardhistory.com/item/an-attractive-sol...
The newer stuff is a heck of a lot better than the olden stuff.