"Tape"!!!???
It was one the first things I got rid of when one of the companies I worked for asked me to maintain their ageing 3 PC computer system 12 years ago. They now have an NAS, 1Gbps networking, five hardwired PC's, a networked A3 printer and 2.4/5/6GHz WiFi. And a back-up protocol...
Tape! As I said, a lost art.
Time for an old man’s story. Don’t read if you are not interested, TL/DR and all of that.
The Department of Energy National Lab I worked for had three tape robots holding 10,000 tapes each totaling 600 PBytes of nearline storage back in 2017, surely well past exabytes by now given the increase in tape storage density. In addition to all of the raw and processed data from the Fermilab experiments, it also has a copy of all of the raw and processed data from the CMS experiment at CERN (one of the experiments that found the Higgs Boson). By Federal policy we (and the other National Labs, and NSF/NIH-funded research groups) had to maintain archives of all of those data plus the ability to read and interpret them. In the robot were copies of data, for example, from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey that were written from about 2000-2005 by software I wrote for VME-based Motorola 68040 single board computers running VxWorks.
There was a time when some at the lab, which had used tape going back to mainframe-style and then 8mm (there were a quarter of a million 8mm tapes stored on site when I started there in 1995), advocated going to disk instead, and I worked on a prototype aiming at large banks of FireWire-attached drives that we would spin up on demand (because the power consumption of keeping them spinning in perpetuity was not justified). In the end we concluded that tape is much more secure - tape cartridges all have mechanical “write-lock” slides or tabs or switches that can be set, disk drives lost the read-only jumper back in the early parallel SCSI days. My boss would joke that telling the Secretary of Energy that the data had all been lost because of a software error or a rogue employee would not go over well.
Tape is cheaper than disk. Tape is mechanically more reliable than disk. Tape stored correctly will last 20+ years. Tape data density is similar to disk density (volume wise, and denser weight-wise). Tape is much less susceptible to my human soft errors that sometimes damage file systems and lose data. Tape is more transportable than disk (considerably less fragile and less massive than spinning disk), so I can write a backup and take it to a relative’s house 100 miles away for safe keeping. Enterprise tape has similar streaming bandwidth as disk (my LTO-6 does 160 MB/second, and it is 3 generations behind the latest LTO-9, with each generation increasing rate and density). Tape definitely isn’t for everybody, but it works well for my needs. It is my ultimate guarantee against data loss if one or more of my NAS systems fail, or some software catastrophe occurs.
(As an aside, the project I lead at the high point had designed, built, and operated Infinband-connected Linux clusters spanning over 1500 PCs, and our parallel disk system had a couple of hundred spindles. Quantity, as Stalin noted, has a quality all it’s own. Those 1500 PCs were perhaps 10% of the computer count at the lab. Together with CERN, Fermilab created its own Linux distribution - Scientific Linux - when available distributions were not adequate for our needs.)
