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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

The advice I got long ago from an IT guy was: if you wait long enough, tape will be on top again.

That was a long time ago but I’ve peeked in at backup systems in the intervening years and it does seem to hold true over time.

But it really depends how much data you have. My ex dropped a single HDD in a safety deposit box at CoB, N times per week and fetched back the oldest disk. I don’t think she ever said how many were in there but I doubt it was more than three. I think the CTO took one home with him once per week.

The silly thing about most of this set up is that the office, the bank, and the data center were all within half a kilometer of each other. If something bad happened to that part of town they only had the infrequent offsite backup.

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Every time I've looked, tapes were on top "again" for large scale archival. And I've been looking for ~20 years by now.

I don't get where people get the impression that X was at the top right before tapes got that last innovation (where X here is most often HDDs, but not always). But that's always the impression, and tapes are always on top.

People also have been working with 3D phase change drives since the 90s. Those always promise to replace tapes. But nobody ever got them robust enough to leave the labs.

Tape might win for large-scale systems, but it's basically dead for home-office scale.

You used to be able to get modestly priced tape units for home use from the old "connects to the floppy controller" units with capacities in the tens of megabytes, up to some late-gen SCSI/IDE/parallel/early USB models that would be a couple of gigabytes, but still at home-friendly prices. What's today's answer? An enterprise-grade device that might put 10TB+ on a tape, but comes with a four-figure price tag and isn't really sold at Best Buy.

If I want to back up the house today (maybe 4 active PCs, 5-6Tb of total space), affordable choices are pretty much disc-based. I could choose a cheap NAS (ended up doing that with an old fanless Atom machine and a used 12TB datacentre drive) or get a USB-attached external drive. Even if I used BD-XL media, even my modest needs would be dozens of discs, plus getting a writer in a shrinking market. There are plenty of datahoarders with much bigger needs, but even for them, tape is completely outside the addressable market.

the sort of bad that would render all three unreadable would probably melt the rest of the infrastructure the company relies on for business anyway.

20tb and under is easy. 500tb is hard

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