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Comment by comboy | Hacker News Reader

get some used LTO-5 / LTO-6 drive if you have some desktop/server to plug it in

LTO tapes are the worst possible format for passing on family photos to family members. I dread to think of anyone in my family trying to setup an LTO drive when they barely understand how to use their smartphone.

I mean if you don't print them and want digital and we're talking having them for the next generation(s) then pretty much whatever current format you choose, it won't be the one that's widely used in the future so it will require some tech knowledge. And LTO tech stayed pretty settled and compatible for quite a few years now.

LTO drives/tape are not friendly, consumer grade technology. One look on a search engine, and it's all obscure refurbished server parts costing hundreds. The prices of them going forwards might increase sharply too and make it unviable...a bit like external hard drives right now. So yeah, printing everything out and hoping for the best is the only sensible option...

Digitally printed photos are also quickly deteriorating, I learned when I look at the fridge where we posted some of our best shots. These are about ten years old. Opposed to analog printed photos that are more than 45 years old and are still in the same condition as ever.

True, although UV exposure has a big impact so not really a fair comparsion.

Why? Both sorts of prints are exposed to the same amount of UV as they are pinned to the same fridge.

I wonder if there is a better printing technology comparable to analog "prints" (of film). That would actually make more sense (to me) than saving everything on M-Disc.

Ah, sorry I thought the old ones were stashed somewhere. Yeah, I'd like that too, although not sure who would I trust telling me that these will actually be like this in 30 years.

In the meantime I found out that there are in fact printing technologies based on pigments with a longer lifespan. For instance Epson Surecolor or Canon imagePROGRAF. The alternative is to use online services who produce actual "c-prints" of digital images.

My grandkids AI robot will figure it out for them, right?

Your grandkids will just say "make me some memories" and their AI will look at your posting history and gen up some fresh new ancestors very similar to the originals.

I will forever live on to nag them through a screen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFenaK4wIsw

There are companies that can read the tapes for you, especially for a one-off transfer.

This is an _additional_ layer of backups, on top of the usual iCloud/whatever things. LTO is certainly not user-friendly, but neither is it especially user-hostile.

And I think I trust tapes far better than any other alternative for long-term storage as they have by far the smallest areal density of information compared to disks (hard or optical).

I have DVD disks that are barely 10 years old and that I can't read anymore. Hard drives also die in storage and/or during transport.

These companies charge a megabuck. Maintaining the drives doesn't come cheap. I am (like other ageing former mainframe operatives) the holder of a variety of tape forms, and nobody local wants the hassle of giving me a bitstream, without significant vig. Like thousands.

Recently the computer museum helped recover early 1970s unix tapes. It was a big deal.

I got introduced to LTO by needing to read several tapes with archival data. It was pretty cheap, around $200 back around 2014. I can certainly believe that the old mainframe tapes are way more trouble.

And let's not exaggerate the complexity of setting up external tape drives, even on Windows/macOS.

> And let's not exaggerate the complexity of setting up external tape drives, even on Windows/macOS.

Having found a matching Sun Ultra 5 generation drive, I tried to get it to work with a SCSI card, and had .. many many problems. It may be the rubber bands. It may be stiction. it may be ants. It may be me.

I would personally love to de-exaggerate the complexitity: Old hardware is gnarly. I sourced parts, it wasn't working.

Have you tried LTO tapes and drives? They are seriously better than the bad old tape drives. They even have a standardized filesystem (LTFS) that can be mounted as a normal (albeit very slow) disk. No need to deal with arcane TAR stuff.

And yeah, I started with a ZX-Spectrum with cassette tapes. I was pleasantly surprised by the overall LTO experience.

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