Slashdot Mirror
Is LTO Tape On Its Way Out?
storagedude writes: With LTO media sales down by 50% in the last six years, is the end near for tape? With such a large installed base, it may not be imminent, but the time is coming when vendors will find it increasingly difficult to justify continued investment in tape technology, writes Henry Newman at Enterprise Storage Forum.
"If multiple vendors invest in a technology, it has a good chance of winning over the long haul," writes Newman, a long-time proponent of tape technology. "If multiple vendors have a technology they're not investing in, it will eventually lose over time. Of course, over time market requirements can change. It is these interactions that I fear that are playing out in the tape market."
"If multiple vendors invest in a technology, it has a good chance of winning over the long haul," writes Newman, a long-time proponent of tape technology. "If multiple vendors have a technology they're not investing in, it will eventually lose over time. Of course, over time market requirements can change. It is these interactions that I fear that are playing out in the tape market."
LTO tape
Is kinder than duct
When applied to the face
With the latter, you're Canucked.
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Magtape is the only viable medium for things which are actually "backups" as that term is understood in the professional IT arena. Every other possible medium for backups has faults which cripple it for one or more of the requirements which backups are required to fulfill -- primarily that's length of storage, but there are lot of other fun failure modes.
Sure, spinning magnetic storage, optical media, and flash drives each have some advantages for specific purposes.
But go pull the post-close EOY General Journal from 1996 off of one, I dare you.
And if you think that's an overly strict requirement, a) you're probably wrong, and b) I can come up with lots more that you won't.
My commercial backup guidelines are these:
You need it backed up on at least 4 pieces of media, of at least 3 different types, in at least 2 different cities, in at least 1 different state; bumping each of those numbers up by 1 is not unreasonable.
Only one backup can be on optical media; only one can be on spinning magnetic media, whether it's powered or not (this includes the cloud, and local external HDD backups, whether powered 24/7, alternating, or pulled and shelved).
Flash media is right out, as are SSDs.
I can pull 20 year old DC3000 tapes off my shelf and read them -- as long as I have a SCSI interface for the computer in question.
GNU tar is great that way.
That is why it is named Low Terran Orbit.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
except me.
And sorry, Google is broke on my PC I opened a help ticket
Its taken far too long to get the the larger sizes these small size jumps seems to be holding it back. on the Hard drive size you can get 10TB drives now, tapes are still stuck at 2.5TB. I expect to have 25TB tapes it seems to me they just wanna keep selling auto loaders
For some time the tapes that were readily available had a huge capacity advantage over hard drives. That advantage is quickly shrinking. While there is still an edge in cost-per-TB for tape, that is decaying quickly as well. If tape can't reestablish that advantage we might see LTO and any other remaining formats go the way of the dodo while data centers change to spinning HDDs or even SSDs as the price of the latter continues to come down (while its long-term reliability goes up).
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I'm not sure I buy this argument; it seems to me to be based on too narrow a view of the universe of different use cases.
I certainly haven't seen *all* of them myself, but in general, I've seen enough to be skeptical of "tape can't do it arguments.
And LTO-10 is 48TB/cart. Uncompressed, I assume.
Tape sales have dropped in half, but tape capacity has increased 3-fold in the same time.
I would imagine that those who were using more than 1 tape 6 years ago to do their backups would require fewer tapes now to do the same job.
Maybe their niche is still rock solid (albeit stagnant), but technological development of the product has reduced demand.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
posting as AC since I don't have an account, posted only maybe 6 times in past decade
http://h30507.www3.hp.com/t5/Around-the-Storage-Block-Blog/Where-is-tape-media-headed/ba-p/167540#.VHU3svGzvns
6,400 Petabytes of tape shipped in first quarter of 2014 (for the industry) -- an all time record -- and 24% year over year growth.
Perhaps individual tape sales are down, but tape sizes are of course up, so capacity shipments continue to grow.
I plan to deploy tape at my company next year. We have offsite backups already(dedupe'd etc), I want offline backups next.
Maybe LTO the spec will be superseded and taken over by a next gen cartridge technology, but the medium is still cheaper than disk today. This is going to change in 10-20 years, but you're still going to have legacy systems sticking around after that for 10 years. Today, for keeping petabytes of data secure/resilient long term tape is the cheaper solution.
No, what you are seeing is less backups.
Stuff being moved to the 'cloud' and backup is someone else's problem - except - it isn't.
A couple of good disasters with 'an unforseeable combination of circumstances' :) wiping out a bank or simillar and tape sales will increase again.
I'm a fan of tape backup when managed responsibly, but there's a fallacy that goes with recommending tape for backups: because you can train semitechnical users to dutifully change tapes and carry them offsite (e.g. on a bank run to a safe deposit box), tape gets recommended for businesses who don't have dedicated IT. But the duty of of maintaining the backup gets delegated from the original trained user, and changing the tapes becomes the whole of the backup maintenance: no one actually verifies that the backup job is running properly. I've been on calls to clients who've diligently changes their tapes nightly, but the backup software has been crashed for months...
From 1981 to 2011 I have been using Tape Backups for my private, business and customer systems. It was cheap, reliable and fast, my first drive had 5MB with a transferrate of 20KB/s, my last drive hat 200GB with a transfer rate of 30MB/s.
But no more.
Drives are fucking expensive (and they die a lot), media are fucking expensive (and are no better than other media),
Lets say I could buy a drive with 2TB for â200 and a 2TB media for â10 or a 10TB for â500 and a 10TB media for â50 then I would at least consider using tape again.
But right now I pay â1600 for a 2TB drive and â40 for a 2TB catridge. Thats insane, I can buy 60TB of hard disk storage just for the drive alone and get another 2TB cheaper than buying tapes.
And trust me, hard drive stored in a dark, locked box will work even better than tapes.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
-Andrew S. Tanenbaum
lucm, indeed.
Multiple times I've taken an HDD out of service and later (like 1 year later, not decades) tried to spin it up again and had it fail. HDD's suck for offline storage. You have to keep them spinning and also back up their contents to other drives, which sort of defeats the purpose of using them as a backup medium. The main problem with tape is, as you say, that it's too damn expensive, especially for the drives. But a vault full of tapes is likely to be far more reliable than a vault full of powered-off HDD's.
LTO-9 goes to 25TB/cart, LTO-10 goes to 48TB.
So comparing this to AWS glacier, at 0.01 USD/GB, that is 480 USD for 48 TB...
Probably still an advantage to tapes... but how close it?
Suppose you have 12TB to backup.
$1600 for a 2TB drive and $40 for a 2TB catridge. = $1720
3x4TB drives = $390
Tape isn't in the ballpark. And, the tape drives fail more often than disks. O.K. if you have hundreds of TB that changes, but small office 12TB would be enough, particularly if you don't archive the cat videos.
Tape media's greatest benefit is its long storage life. Providing you have the equipment to do it, you could read a tape created 25 years ago.
Tape media's greatest liability is its long storage life. Will you be able to find equipment to read it 25 years from now? If not, you have what we call write-only media.
I think that tape is going to disappear as a viable storage medium, at least in the small business sector. The equipment and media is expensive, and most small businesses don't have the resources to employ someone trained in proper media management.
The replacement is going to be offsite storage farms, whether from a third-party cloud provider, or farms owned by the company that needs the backups. As the per-byte cost of disk storage continually and rapidly falls and wide-area network (Internet) bandwidth increases, offsite/online backups are becoming more and more feasible. Data deduplication and image management software technologies mean that a company can have daily backups completely automated and available as far back as they want. Restoring a file or two from these backups is quick and easy. My company already supports several small businesses using this backup technology; as existing tape drives fail they are seldom being replaced with more tape hardware.
The downside of offsite/online backups is that bare-metal recovery of a failed system from those backups is still extremely time-consuming. Eventually the bandwidth will become available to make it viable; until then tape still seems to be the best option for bare-metal recovery.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
In 1996 I had a 40 MB QIC-80 tape drive ( and every time I tried to restore from it, the tape was corrupt even though it had recently verified just fine ). Do you *really* think that your $4000 LTO drive you got in the last 5 years can still read that thing? I don't think so. SCSI interface? You mean 5 MHz SCSI-1? They haven't made cards compatible with that for over a decade.
On the other hand, my blue ray optical drive still reads CD-R media from 1996.
If you are planning on retaining data for that long, you are an idiot if you plan on keeping it on the original media the whole time. You periodically verify the backups and migrate them to new media as technology marches on.
Working in climate science I can tell you that tape for us isn't going anywhere. Our investment gets larger in it every year, at least monetarily and capacity wise. Several of our groups have growth curves that scale linearly with the output of the supercomputers, meaning our growth is almost exponential. Most of this data is static and doesn't really change once it's been produced, but it does need to be read from time to time. There's no other solution out there that takes little to no power to store, no cooling, and can keep the data for years with minimal loss of integrity. We have data that goes back to the 1940's that we have to keep almost forever, this historical data is hugely important in how we create the models and cannot be lost. So we have to have somewhere to store all that data for the long haul, LTO is the medium of choice because it's vendor agnostic, fast enough, cheap, and large enough to handle what we need it to handle.
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
That near-instant access also allows other uses. For example, when a small business client's web site is defaced or simply broken, I can run rsync --dry-run and tell them exactly which files have changed - in minutes, while they're still on the phone. I can restore the damaged files just as quickly.
Tape has it's place, but online offsite backups, done right, have some very significant advantages too.
Huh? I've never seen one before. Guess I'll have to Google magnetic tape to see what it looks like.
And LTO-10 is 48TB/cart. Uncompressed, I assume.
Afaict the highest version of LTO you can actually buy is LTO-6 with a capacitity of 2.5TB. I consider it highly doubtful that LTO-10 is much more than a set of goals/desired specifications on a roadmap.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Hang on, I'll get to the mod comment in a moment. First things first, which is a complete line of crap if you are dealing with medium to large amounts of data in your DR plan and have a long term requirement for DR. Keep in mind that the person you are responding to is talking about long term DR strategy that dates back decades.
I'm not sure which world you are living in where 10 year old hard drives require less space than LTO, but this is not physically possible. Are you trying to claim that you are using today's higher density drives through a time warp, or that you really have no experience with legacy system DR and are only working with current technology? No matter how you slice it you are dishonest, so let me go with the first assumption. SSDs were available about 10 years ago, but there is no way anyone in a production environment used them for more than testing or highly disposable purposes. The sizes back then were the same or less than SCSI (256GB in "production" drives), reliability was atrocious, and quite honestly we banned them during testing because they lasted days maximum in our high performance compute environment where they could have been the most beneficial. The footprints for the drives were exactly that of SCSI, which is about 4 times the area of an LTO tape. Data per cubic inch did not compare, and this is simple math to check.
So maybe you are not referring to SSD, maybe you are referring to Spindled disks from 10 years ago? If that is the case, please explain to us how you are shipping boxes of HDs off to Iron Mountain for safe keeping and ensuring that the heads are not damaged?
Next, you are not doing much in terms of mass data DR with hard drives no matter which HDs you are using. I can buy an IBM 35xx with 8-32 read/write heads and 256 cartridges in the chassis. I can pull out LTO1 tapes from 15 years ago and read them natively and I can read and write faster than any hard drive on the market. Doing this with hard drives you are going to have to go to Ebay and hope like hell you can buy a JBOD/DAS device compatible with your drives, then hope like hell you can figure out how to import the sets if you are using something like VFS/VCS and not standard LVM. Good grief, it's not "easier" or "faster" by any stretch of the imagination unless you are responsible for very little data. Generally the people using LTO are backing up a good amount of data on average. We have 28 Petabytes on line. Probably only 5-6 Petabytes are backed up regularly, but go ahead and try this on your "removable hard drive" backup strategy.
In other words, the only way your arguments can be valid is if you are responsible for very little data or perhaps you really don't have to worry about DR as you originally claimed. Many of us deal with Government contracts that require full scale DR, and many large businesses have similar requirements, and thes requirements include retention of 7+ years.
Not counting legacy systems, we have been migrating some data to multi-site DR (not full DR) to save money. Plucking hard drives is _still_ a horrible idea even given the higher density newer drives. Retention on a removable HD does not, and can not match the lifespan for an LTO tape which is designed specifically for a long lifespan.
Now to the point about moderation. I pointed this out the other day in a submission and a thread, moderation has been absolutely wretched lately. Nothing against this guys post getting moderated "Interesting" because it should generate comments. The person he responded to receives NO moderation and should be moderated as "insightful" since he is obviously involved in large scale DR. A whopping 2 posts have been moderated in this thread, and one contains wrong information for anyone curious about large scale DR.
It's not the incorrect posts being moderate that's the problem, it's the lack of moderation on posts correcting bad information.. and the lack of moderation overall in the last week or so that is the problem. For the last week moderation has amounted to an explicit bias, of no benefit or incentive for progressive dialogue (which is the whole goddamn point of the moderation system).
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
That's the original Y2K problem
You're defining a problem 2000 years in advance
The original problem is known as The Conundrum of Y0K
Said below but not, perhaps, as clearly as this.
In a about year and a half (depending on how compressible your data is among other factors), your storage fees for the cloud equal tape. In a week, your restore fees exceed the cost of tape, libraries, drives and climate controlled storage fees once you start measuring your backups and restores in the tens or hundreds of terabytes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNliOm9NtCM
If their software would be FLOSS tape would make sense for many more people (companies/institutions rather).
For some time the tapes that were readily available had a huge capacity advantage over hard drives. That advantage is quickly shrinking. While there is still an edge in cost-per-TB for tape, that is decaying quickly as well.
That is not the point. The reason for doing backups is to recover data to a state before loss of data occurred be it deliberate or accidental.
Sure you can get hard drives that you can can fit your data on however to do a proper backup you should send your backup media off-site. Doing backups onto a hard drive may be fine for home use, in fact I do this my self, however for business this is not a solution in fact it is a disaster waiting to happen since a hard drive (SSD or spinning disk) is an electronic device and a relatively fragile one at that, with more potential for failure than a tape which is a robust passive device.
As an example say you want to backup a 25 TB of data how would you go about doing this and be able to go to your manager or even Board of Directors with a confidence factor of 99.999% reliability for recovery? OK I will make this easier, how do you backup 1TB of data and still be able to meet this reliability? While I am not going to answer since it would take up many pages of documentation (ie. IT disaster recovery) it must be said that backup solution consultants get paid quite a considerable amounts of money to make sure that a companies' data has very little chance of being lost.
Even today with much larger capacity disks you still need reliable backup and recovery strategies and hard disks while they can assist (see Disk based Virtual Tape Library) are still not a total solution. Even "Remote IT Services" (aka "Da Cloud") still require a very high level of reliability so backup and recovery solutions are still very important and (if they are professional) they still use backup tapes.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
There's also the cost of powering the storage. Hard disks, you're either online or you're not; if you need to access the data, you need to make sure the disk is plugged in, switched on, and spinning. Tapes, you can rack 'em on a shelf in the library, and if you need to access the data, mount it in a tape drive with the robot.
The ease of powering up a hard disk, versus loading up a tape cartridge, means that tape still wins - by a significant margin - on the power scale for nearline storage. And yes, nearline storage is still very much a thing in some industries.
Tape is dead in most small business already. There's just no point in it. Putting all your eggs in one tape-format basket means that when you have a fire, not only do you have to spend days getting your data back, you've also got to pay a small fortune for the machine that can do that (if those drives even exist any more).
Extended NAS systems are what I see taking over from tape. Automatic network replication to a copy that then gets marked read-only, forwarded and verified to other NAS further down the line, etc. Offsite backup can be as simple as taking a NAS home for the smaller outfits, or mirroring to an off-site NAS or cloud storage.
Sure, one NAS is not "backup" on its own. You don't want to be able to overwrite written data automatically, But if you have enough of them, they become very reliable at a cheaper pricepoint than handling tape backups. This means you can buy more of them, and buy "more" reliability.
If your data is mirrored this way, in enough places on devices that don't automatically modify themselves to the very latest data, then you have backups. The old-farts of IT like to tell you otherwise, and bring up "RAID is not backup". But, sorry, at scale, and managed as such, it actually is. Especially when you have a RAID of RAIDs that you manage and cycle and secure properly
And buying something of that scale is something that a small business can do much easier with spinning disks than they can with tape. For the cost of the last tape drive and initial tapes, I can buy half a dozen NAS devices of larger size that - in a pinch - I can run VM storage from directly (iSCSI, etc.) if I want.
Restore times are better. Capacity is much better. The automation is much easier. Networking is so much easier. Restore is so much more "obvious" if your network guy suddenly dies.
There are concerns, but so long as you are considering them, they are rarely barriers. Most places do not need to keep data for dozens and dozens of years, and offline retention for most drives is actually stupidly impressive. Those that do generally cycle backups onto new media anyway, so nothing's changed there.
But drives are scaling SO MUCH faster than tape that it's stupendous. Hell, tape is often within range of SSD storage (not that I'd trust retention on that without a lot of redundant backups until the tech matures properly). And you can literally pop down to the local computer shop and buy a NAS that will backup your entire small business network - something you can't really do with tape. Do that a couple of times a year and you have a backup that's probably superior to whatever you had before.
I work in schools. The previous school had tape but it was a "last resort" backup. We never restored from one in 5 years despite two server failures. Always, there was a NAS or even just a drive that had the data available which could get us up and running NOW, this second, rather than 8 hours down the line. By the end of that employment, we'd basically abandoned tape use as anything other than putting one in the fire safe next to the drive backups (which were mirrored to encrypted cloud storage). The IT audit I had when they were trying to justify pruning every member of staff? Couldn't find a fault in the backup strategy and was able to see more copies of the data than they actually believed necessary.
The school I work for now - they employed me because their last guy didn't backup (to tape or anything else) and they lost the entire data and had to send live drives off to a data recovery firm. My prime concern has always been not repeating his mistakes, and showing that their data is safe. I NAS everything and there isn't a tape around.
It's pointless to worry about tape and expensive drives when you can just slap a NAS in each building, mirror to them as appropriate, mirror that to an off-site NAS, mirror that to the cloud, etc. The extra space available means you can store more historical copies in the case of a rollback.
And even from pe
changing the tapes becomes the whole of the backup maintenance: no one actually verifies that the backup job is running properly. I've been on calls to clients who've diligently changes their tapes nightly, but the backup software has been crashed for months..
I've seen the same thing, but I think the entire backup process is something of a kabuki dance because just seeing "Job success" is a false sense of security in and of itself.
Do you know if the media is usable to restore from? Do you know if the data backed up is capable of actually being used to restore to function whatever system was backed up?
I think most places fall down on these two items. Where I work we are told to do restores from backup media to validate usability -- but just very partial restores, a handful of random files, which really only validates simple to verify data (a common file, small executable, etc). I've seen plenty of instances where the tapes (even LTO) stumbles further into the media -- is it the drive? The specific bit of media?
But almost nobody does a real restore, where they attempt to restore an entire system from backup (which almost always means multiple servers).
Several years ago when the overall tape market was declining, this was essentially due to the growth of LTO being masked as it cannibalised all the other tape formats (DAT, DLT, SAIT, et al), the overall number of LTO media shipments has continued to increase, that is, PB's shipped.
Two tape-centric factors are in play; capacities keep getting massively bigger but there are fewer customers that can actually use up all the available capacity. Spooks, arguably, but there are lot fewer intelligence agencies in the world than the small and medium-sized businesses that make up the bulk (around 80 percent) of the global economy. The Entertainment industries sure like LTO, its capaciousness and reliability has proven ideal for archiving the digital masters of their SD/HD/4k/IMAX/onwards and upwards formats. Though again, not that many when compared to the global economy.
The second factor is, everyone's known LTO-7 has been coming for a while and tape purchasing cycles always slow down around the introduction of a new capacity point. Organisations usually skip a generation (people who bought LTO-3, probably skipped four and upgraded to five) and once they do buy a new generation, usually buy a smaller library as they can now store double the capacity in a library half the size (and cost).
Like any tech, once the easy science and engineering is done, the market shakes out and the few reamining players begin to consolidate, usually down to one or two as tape has done, as disk is now doing and as SSD's will do in the next couple of years. Right now the only companies doing fundamental physics and materials research into tape are IBM and Fujifilm. Quantum no longer makes its own drives, HP will not make its own LTO-7, leaving everybody buying off IBM while the long-tail business windows down. IBM has played the same game here thay played with mainframes, they doubled-down and invested in new technology when everyone else was giving up in the face of Windows and PC's. The mainframe busines is still a $2bn per annum business and will remain a significant chunk o' change for many years to come. (Arguably, it's actually growing in some places...) That's a nice business model where all the costs have been sunk and what's left is maintenance margin. Well-played IBM. (As long as IBM's tape business can survive the sinking revenues of it's disk business which it's lumped in with).
Maybe to survive LTO will roll into a proper joint-venture, single manufacturer, where HP, IBM, Quantum and perhaps Oracle, throw in their IP to keep the drive technology best-of-breed and keep their share of that long-tail business. (Don't hold you breath though, too many ego's in that equation). Maybe it'll spin out into a niche business like OpenVMS has.
Given the problems the disk manufacturers appear to be having in shipping their new tech (SMD and HAMR) to the public in volume and the rise of SSD's, given that there is no significant amount of disk in (the massive global) archive, it's likely hard disks will die off well before tape does as it's far easier to swap out todays primary arrays for SSD's than it will be to migrate the mass of archives on tape.
Multiple times I've taken an HDD out of service and later (like 1 year later, not decades) tried to spin it up again and had it fail. HDD's suck for offline storage. You have to keep them spinning and also back up their contents to other drives, which sort of defeats the purpose of using them as a backup medium. The main problem with tape is, as you say, that it's too damn expensive, especially for the drives. But a vault full of tapes is likely to be far more reliable than a vault full of powered-off HDD's.
While I have seen the phenomenon you speak of, I don't see it being as bad a scenario as you paint it. Not every hard drive pulled from deep storage fails. In fact, the failure is likely on par with just about every other storage (even your pressed CD collection is dying a slow death)
I'm still spinning 20-year old platters today (which ironically I had to move the drives because the motherboard died)
Tape is great for archive purposes. It would be a shame if LTO dies.
The biggest threat to LTO is the lack of vendors developing drives. At this time only very few companies do R&D for tape devices. IBM, HP and Oracle are the only serious players.
Oracle develops only Enterprise class drives (T10K), not LTO. The market for those drives is quite small, which means the R&D cost needs to be recovered from a relatively low volume. That makes them bl**dy expensive.
HP develops LTO. They have to do R&D for LTO only, as they have no enterprise class drives. LTO is considered commodity so margins are too low to spend a lot on R&D. They will therefor struggle to be cost effective.
IBM develops both an enterprise class (Jaguar) and LTO tape drives. From a tech perspective, IBM are in the best position, as they can develop new technology for their enterprise drives, recoup cost in that segment, and then commoditize the technology in their LTO drives. Unfortunately IBM no longer wants to be a hardware company.
This does not bode well for tape technology in general. I've made a good living from it writing software for tape drives, but I guess all good things come to an end.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Mag tape is definitely on the way out, because it's slow and the drives require regular maintenance to keep them working reliably. Sure, it meets your "requirements" - but I'd argue that MOST businesses really don't need to do things the way you've proposed in order to have a more than reasonable amount of data security.
I've never been a big fan of flash storage as archival backup. Even for consumers only needing a backup of a small photo collection or what-not? Putting it on thumb drives winds up being a false sense of security when the cheap Asian flash chip fails suddenly, with no advance warning, as soon as the drive is plugged into a USB port to access it.
But I can still pull archived ZIP files off of CDRs we burned in 1996-97 -- in response to your "But go pull the post-close EOY General Journal from 1996 off of one, I dare you." comment.
And most of what you're really talking about isn't backup/archiving, but rather, disaster recovery (having multiple copies of the data in different cities and states). There's no reason TAPE makes that any easier than other forms of media. In fact, today's easiest way to accomplish that is using cloud storage with reliable services who already have redundant data centers and backups done at all sites.
Didn't you get that papyrus-memo? Everyone wanted to require a Negative number on all the clay tablets. The scribes were looking forward to the overtime, the Donkey cart guys were in favor of shipping em from Helios mountain DR site, but Ceasar said no and settled on AD for Go-Forward only.
Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
There is a huge difference. RTOs no longer allow for the time to restore from it, but long term archival to take is very viable. It's power is that the medium is separate from the mechanics of the heads and drive motors. You can replace a drive with a newer one and read a few generations older tape - but if a hard drive has an internal breakdown, you're sending it in to a data recovery company.
Yea kinda sucks when your language dies
That's why you need to include children's books and dictionaries in collection, so that future archaeologists will have an easier time learning the language. The illustrated children's books are for bootstrapping basic competence; the dictionaries are for building more complex meanings.
They *did* decide on a standard, universal filesystem for tape decades ago: it's called tar.