IEEE Spectrum:
Studies show that the amount of data being recorded is increasing at 30 to 40 percent per year. At the same time, the capacity of modern hard drives, which are used to store most of this, is increasing at less than half that rate. Fortunately, much of this information doesn’t need to be accessed instantly. And for such things, magnetic tape is the perfect solution.
Seriously? Tape? The very idea may evoke images of reels rotating fitfully next to a bulky mainframe in an old movie like Desk Set or Dr. Strangelove. So, a quick reality check: Tape has never gone away!
I bet the vast majority of people have no idea what magnetic tape storage is but that the vast majority of The Loop readership not only knows but has used it in the past and maybe still does.
Are you thinking about reading Apple II stuff into the computer via cassette? Other than that, the only magtape I had close proximity to was the mainframe room at the University of Oregon during registration (they were using punchcards at the time. Gad, I’m old.
We used to have a $20,000 (I think) “robotic” tape backup. I think it worked for about three months.
These days, my only use of tape is indirectly via cloud services. I’m thrilled to read they use it!
Loading students’ punchcards was my second job at college. My third was in the mainframe room, helping run backups each afternoon. Both tape and cakebox hard disks were involved.
Bet I’m older than you.
Tape is what the National Archives uses for data backup simply because there is nothing more reliable yet. They calculated a stable data structure can be preserved for ~30 years on tape. Oh, and they store them in sub-zero refrigerators. Biggest problem is being able to access those files 30 years later with modern computers, OSs n such.
If memory serves (not well these days) I also had some proximity to tapes at IBM Watson and at a research lab at Yale that was using VAXs. Very blurry though. I’m 66.
That is correct. But this story sure is news to me.
And I sure hope these current tape drives are more reliable than the desktop ones I went through in a previous decade.
I was very happy when we got the robotic tape backup machine, as my first job was being the boy who had to manually change the old reel-to-reel tapes thirty times during the weekly backups!
On the plus side, the reel-to-reel was an astonishing machine that self-laced its pickup reel using a vacuum system—watching the tape being magically sucked over and apparently wrapping itself around the second reel hub was like watching a magic trick!
Tape was the only option for storage on my Commodore Pet.
When I computerized the air freight company I worked for in the early 80s, I had tape drive backups in each branch’s server. But I don’t think I’ve used tape since then.
Dang it. 58.
And Queens College wasn’t nearly posh enough for anything better than a Xerox Sigma 7 back then.
58! Whippersnapper!
Eat my dust, geezer!
I’m on a low-dust diet….
On the other hand, for normies, hard drives are much more sensible – the cost per terabyte is only about twice that of LTO8 tapes – and that elides the around $3k for the LTO8 drive itself.
Add in random access and you have a winner, for normal people usage.
(For institutional archiving for compliance, for huge datasets you may well never need again, for anything like that?
Tape might never lose, no.)
30 years?
Is there any reason to believe a rotary hard disk is less reliable for long-term storage, if you don’t have it powered on?
(Leave it running and it has an expected life of about five years, yes.
And remember, we live in the future – FAT was introduced on floppy drives in 1977, and every OS you use can read a FAT volume, today, and that support is likely to never, ever go away.
Combine that with the back-compatibility and ubiquity of USB, and it shouldn’t be difficult to keep data readable for centuries, assuming you can find hardware durable enough to not fall apart from pure age.
Format rot is an easily solved problem, with open source specs and implementation; hardware is trickier – but with 3D printing, FPGAs, and the like, it’s not even that difficult, at that institutional level*.
* Example: You can, today, buy for $60 or so, a device that will let a commodity SD card pretend to be a SCSI-1 hard drive; narrow SCSI has been obsolete for a quarter century now, but aftermarket hobbyists made these devices go, for obsolete computing.
I don’t think the National Archives should have a problem, if they bother to document things.)