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Comment by UltraSane | Hacker News Reader

For truly write once read never data tape is the optimal storage method. It is exactly what the LTO standard was designed to do and it does it very well. You can be confident that you will be able to read every bit of data from a 30 year old tape, probably even 50 years old. It has the lowest bit error rate of any technology I am aware of. LTO-9 is better than 1 uncorrectable bit error in 10^20 user bits, which is 1 bit error in 12.5 exabytes. There is also the substantial advantage that tapes on a shelf are completely immune to ransomware. As a sysadmin I get that warm fuzzy feeling when critical data is backed up on a good LTO tape library.

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As someone who does tape recovery on very very old tape I largely concur with this with a couple of caveats.

1. Do not encrypt your tapes if you want the data back in 30/50 years. We have had so many companies lose encryption keys and turn their tapes into paperweights because the company they bought out 17 years ago had poor key management.

2. The typical failure case on tape is physical damage not bit errors. This can be via blunt force trauma (i.e. dropping, or sometimes crushing) or via poor storage (i.e. mould/mildew).

3. Not all tape formats are created equal. I have seen far higher failure rates on tape formats that are repeatedly accessed, updated, ejected, than your old style write once, read none pattern.

Call it bad luck, but I’ve never had a fully successful restore. Drives eat tapes, drives are damaged and write bad data, robot arms die or malfunction. Tapes have NEVER worked for me. SANs and remote disk though, rock solid.

That said, I don’t miss any of that stuff, gimme S3 any day :)

You do realized that that isn't normal at all? LTO tape is still used by thousands of companies to backup many exabytes of data. I know it once saved Google from permanent loss of gmail data from a bug. You should really get a refund for your tape drives.

Aren't LTO formats only backward compatible with the immediate prior version?

They can write to one version back and read two version back. for really long term data storage you have to also store the read/write hardware.

By the time it's hard to get a compatible LTO drive, I'd be very suspicious of a mothballed drive working either. If you want reliable long term storage you're going to have to update it every couple decades.

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