<story><title>Tape Storage Trundles On, Increases Yearly Volume to 128 Exabytes</title><url>https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tape-storage-trundles-on-increases-yearly-volume-to-128-exabytes</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>johnklos</author><text>People who don&amp;#x27;t use and who don&amp;#x27;t understand the differences between tape and disk have been saying tape is dying for years.&lt;p&gt;The most common incorrect assertion is that drives don&amp;#x27;t fail THAT often, so why not just back up to drives and put them on a shelf? But to be generally safe, all data would have to be on at least two drives, which changes the cost noticeably.&lt;p&gt;Older, used LTO drives are actually quite affordable, so I use LTO-4 and LTO-5 tapes to back up all sorts of things for both myself and for my clients. It&amp;#x27;s surprisingly easy and inexpensive, and pulling files back off is as simple as running pax.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ramraj07</author><text>One important thing is (at least a few years back) we realised that HDDs fail at an alarming rate (&amp;gt; 80%) if you disconnect them and leave them for a few years. Either that or someone brought a gamma ray source through our lab. Keeping the disks hot was a different story though.</text></comment>
<story><title>Tape Storage Trundles On, Increases Yearly Volume to 128 Exabytes</title><url>https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tape-storage-trundles-on-increases-yearly-volume-to-128-exabytes</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>johnklos</author><text>People who don&amp;#x27;t use and who don&amp;#x27;t understand the differences between tape and disk have been saying tape is dying for years.&lt;p&gt;The most common incorrect assertion is that drives don&amp;#x27;t fail THAT often, so why not just back up to drives and put them on a shelf? But to be generally safe, all data would have to be on at least two drives, which changes the cost noticeably.&lt;p&gt;Older, used LTO drives are actually quite affordable, so I use LTO-4 and LTO-5 tapes to back up all sorts of things for both myself and for my clients. It&amp;#x27;s surprisingly easy and inexpensive, and pulling files back off is as simple as running pax.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bluGill</author><text>15 years ago I worked for a tape backup company that got bought out by a company making disk backups. Before they bought us out the CEO was constantly saying &amp;quot;tape is dead&amp;quot; in interviews, but once there was money for him to make in tape he stopped saying that.  I remember when someone asking him about this and he responded something &amp;quot;amazing how money can make you change your tune&amp;quot;</text></comment>