The tapes? Yes. The hardware, though? I'm not sure I would bet on having compatible hardware to read a particular LTO generation tape, decades from now, given how specialty the hardware already is. I don't think there's any free lunch to be had here: the storage media needs to be viable, and you have to have a recovery strategy that's equally viable as well.
EDIT – that being said, "tape as a service" does exist... it's called S3 Glacier.
> LTO tape exists and should last 30 to 50 years in good storage conditions.
Except tape is now rare-bird datacenter thing. Super expensive, and hard to find drives.
The nice thing about discs is they're a mass market consumer medium, so drives have (historically) been very readily available, and they typically have backwards compatibility with old formats.
What are the threat models for tape, and how much do they vary for discs?
I assume if I leave either in my car in an Arizona summer day, it's toast. But are tapes more prone to mould damage in a damp climate, or media shedding if fed through a slightly out-of-adjustment drive?
The problem with M-disc was that it was always a sideshow on the mainstream optical disc market-- like LightScribe/LabelFlash, it was a feature most people weren't interested in except for possibly box-checking during purchase. The main audience was still people buying generic blank discs and burning single use discs or short-term backups.
There is/was an opportunity to box the product up with a clear marketing message of "here's a SMB-scale backup solution", something cheaper than tape, and more built-for-purpose than buying USB hard drives and dangling them off the back of a PC.
I'm picturing the M-disc technology but each disc is pre-installed in a cartridge to discourage accidental scratches/fingerprints/leaving surfaces directly exposed to the sun. It reinforces the "this is durable and you can probably put legal documents you might need for 5-10-20 years on it and leave it in a safe" story. This also creates a vendor-lockin product at a premium price, while quality conventional CD/DVD media was always competing with "but Fry's has spindles of 500 discs for $12.99!"
Optimal LTO tape storage requires a stable, clean environment, ideally
15°C to 25°C (59°F to 77°F) and 20% to 50% relative humidity (non-condensing), which can preserve data for up to 30 years. Tapes must be stored vertically in their protective plastic cases to prevent sagging and contamination.
LTO is enterprise gear that is not suitable for people. If you want to waste alot of time with backups, curate your stuff and get it on optical media. Better yet, print the good stuff on archival papers and ink and stow them securely.
The older generations are pretty accessible price wise yes. They're pretty awful for home use though. Those tape drives are LOUD. Backing up my 90TB NAS takes a week. I don't want to sit in that squealing for a week in my flat. Restoring a single file is a PITA also.
I just use a box full of old harddrives now, i basically use those like tape cassettes.
> I just use a box full of old harddrives now, i basically use those like tape cassettes.
Re: hard drives – I gave up entirely on the idea of storing backups "at rest" indefinitely, and use two NASes at different sites. I only store ~50TB, and I plan to need to recover every five years (e.g. when a working computer finally gives up the ghost.) I end up replacing a HD in a ZFS pool once every two years.
Yeah I wish I could do that but I don't have the money to buy a double set of drives. I often upgrade my NAS by just swapping out a disk for a bigger one and the old one goes into the backup rotation. Right now I have 15 disks in there (and 8 in the actual NAS). Because they are of course smaller drives I need more of them to cover the content.
Buying hardware to keep 15 disks spinning is also pretty expensive :(
LTO9 is like 45TB for <$100 (I got a bunch for €55 a piece), so 4.5TB for <$10 is being generous. And even if you didn't think they lasted 30-40 years and made copies every 3 years, it's still cheaper, not to mention you have fewer tapes to manage.
Also: I don't have a bd/dvd player in my house today, so even if there are the most tremendous gains in medical sciences I'm almost certainly not going to have one in 100+ years, so I'm not sure m disc even makes cost-sense for smaller volumes.
Maybe if you want to keep your data outside for sunshine like the author of the article, but that's not me...
> so even if there are the most tremendous gains in medical sciences I'm almost certainly not going to have one in 100+ years
Never say never. People of today are building "90s entertainment center" setups for nostalgia, complete with VCRs. Given how many generations of game consoles had DVD drives (or BD drives that supported DVDs) in them, I would fully expect the "retro gaming" market of 100 years from now to be offering devices that can play a DVD.
> Also: I don't have a bd/dvd player in my house today
You have just stumbled on the inherent problem with any archival media.
You really think you will have a working tape drive after 40 years?
Hell, in my experience tape drives are mechanically complex and full of super thin plastic wear surfaces. Do you really expect to have a working tape drive in 10 years?
As far as I can tell there is no good way to do long term static digital archives, And in the absence of that you have to depend on dynamic archives, transfer to new media every 5 years.
I think to have realistic long term static archives the best method is to only depend on the mark 1 eyeball. find your 100 best pictures, and print them out. identify important data and print it out. Stuff you want to leave to future generations, make sure it is in a form they can read.
I do think LTO is a common enough format, and explicitly designed to be backwards-compatible, that it is very likely to be around in 10 years. The companies that rely on it wouldn't invest in it if they didn't think the hardware would be available. 40 years, harder to say, but as someone who owns a fair bit of working tape equipment (cassette, VHS, DV) that is almost all 25+ years old, i wouldn't think it'd be impossible.
That said, i imagine optical drives will be much the same.
It is only backwards compatible two generations, occasionally something slips at the LTO trust (or wherever those things are designed) and you get three generations. But if I have a basement full of LTO1 tapes no currently manufactured drive will read them. I would have to buy a used drive and the drives were never really made all that well. Better than the DAT drives one company I worked for used for some of their backups. But still mechanically very complex with many many small delicate plastic parts that wear out quickly. Those DAT drives were super delicate and also suffered from the same generational problems LTO does. We had a bunch of DAT1 tapes somebody wanted data from but had no working drives to do so. All our working drives were newer DAT3 and 4
That was always the hard part to justifying tape backup. the storage is cheap. but the drives are very expensive. And never seemed to last as long as their price would warrant.
This has little to do with whether you curate. That's a whole different discussion about optimizing for cost, where many many terabytes eventually make LTO become cheaper. When we're specifically looking at reliability for important files, there might only be one tape's worth of data. It's a $3000 fee to make that tape (and its backups) last a long time in storage, and having more or less data barely affects the price.
You presume the things I want to save aren't individually TiBs in size.
Anyone who has even an amateur interest in, say, making movies, probably has at least a few projects worth of 4K RAW footage they would hope outlives them. (And the average small-time YouTube content creator has far more.)
I don't know, i don't think any one after me is gonna scrounge through hours of raw footage of an old project of some grandparent (me). Not that I have kids but anyway.
If anything I doubt they'll bother looking at the final cut.
Assuming you need to “get up and go”, like a refugee situation, what are the chances that you’ll find a drive that can read Blu-ray disks, versus the chances that you’ll find a LTO tape drive ?
Blu-ray drives are fast becoming hard to find, so I'd pack a USB bluray drive with your discs.
New computers don't have them and haven't for a few years. I purchased a drive recently and to get a quality drive, I had to go for a NOS pioneer drive, or get another LG, and the LG drives are kid-of shit.
How exactly are they becoming hard to find? There's literally tens of options for brand new drives I can order for next day delivery on Amazon, and endless choice of second hand options on eBay.
LTO drives are expensive but they are very well designed and it is the most reliable portable storage format available. Full LTO tapes in a good fire rated safe really provide a fantastic sense of security. The cost of the drive is amortized over the total bytes you store.
Those tapes in a fire rated safe give a sense of security before the fire.
After the fire, it is likely that the tapes and the papers in the safe are a pile of ash. Fire-rated safes often don't survive fires especially if you live in wildfire country.
It would be neat if someone resurrected Iomega and launched the 2026 version of the Zip drive for local backup. It'd be something like $200 (same as the original Zip drive) and it would take 20TB WORM tapes that cost $20 each. There would be some kind of horrible limitation, like it would take 2 months 24/7 to actually write 20TB, but it would come with simple software that rapaciously grabbed your whole cloud life and local data, and the tapes would last forever.
I just looked, and iomega.com seems to be some kind of malware site. Sad.
