
Companies are once again storing data on tape, just in case - fraqed
https://www.wsj.com/articles/companies-look-to-an-old-technology-to-protect-against-new-threats-1505700180
======
nkassis
I didn't know they ever stopped storing data on tape. Tape to my knowledge has
been pretty much in continuous use at big corps since their invention. Sure
there was things like AWS glacier becoming possible alternatives but tapes are
pretty entrenched.

~~~
zitterbewegung
Some have speculated that AWS Glacier is just a service that still stores
information on Tape anyways. I remember when I saw a robotic tape storage
machine at Fermilab when the Tevatron was still active. That was awesome. They
also had racks of tapes.

See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Glacier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Glacier)

~~~
zlynx
There's other speculation that Glacier is using high density Bluray optical
recording with something like 400 GB per disc.

~~~
cptskippy
Isn't optical media a lot less stable than Tape? This seems like a bad idea if
you're running an archival service.

I use to have a case of CDRs between 1997 and 2004, sometime in 2004 I noticed
that many CDRs were becoming unreadable and switched to external HDDs. I kept
the case for a while and I think it was 2005 or 2006 that all the disks were
empty and I tossed it in the garbage.

Around that same time they were starting to phase out LPT ports on PCs and I
decided to backup everything I had on reused tapes for an Irwin 40mb Tape
drive from 1988 that I acquired sometime in the mid 90s from a salvage shop. I
was able to pull everything off the tapes.

~~~
cat199
> Isn't optical media a lot less stable than Tape? This seems like a bad idea
> if you're running an archival service.

Unless you have some giant warehouse of multiple-copying disk-verifying and
re-duplicating robots running around.. which in the case of amazon might
actually be the case, and at scale, could save lots on media..

to be clear, I have no personal insight as to how their service works

~~~
cptskippy
That seems like a lot more trouble than it's worth.

From a cost perspective it makes no sense at all. An LTO-6 tape is $25 retail
and holds 2.5TB of data, LTO-7 tapes are $90 for 6TB. A 4 Layer BD-R disk is
about $15 retail and holds around 100GB of data.

------
soared
Tape is perfect for things like police bodycam recordings. They need to store
a ridiculous amount of data for decades, and don't need access to it in real
time. Cops/Courts/etc are happy to wait a day for video retrieval because the
costs are so much lower.

I've also thought about how you could store medical patient data on tape, and
retrieve it the day before a patient comes in. Or storing other types of data,
and having ML record what gets retrieved when and try to predict it to reduce
retrieval times. Too bad other storage is so cheap!

------
us0r
Google uses tape. Very cool read/watch.

Summary: [http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/2/3/how-google-backs-
up...](http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/2/3/how-google-backs-up-the-
internet-along-with-exabytes-of-othe.html)

Video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNliOm9NtCM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNliOm9NtCM)

------
gilrain
I've never set up a backup system that didn't have tape rotated into cold
storage as its last step. As far as I know, nothing ever came along that
offered the same value for longevity.

------
bumbledraven
The suit is back!
[http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

~~~
linkregister
I don't think this is an example of a submarine article.

------
dsparkman
I use to work at a small health insurance company with a tech staff of 10
people. 1 persons entire job was to essentially managing the tape backups and
getting them sent/picked up from offsite storage. This was a senior network
administrator.

------
ChuckMcM
The primary advantage that tape still holds over disk is shock resistance. You
can drop a tape cartridge and still expect to get all of the data off it, but
that is not the case for a really high density disk drive.

An interesting thing that might change this would be one time programmable
multi-level flash (OTP MLC flash). It has the shock resistance of tape, the
random access of disk. The $/TB is slowly converging when you consider total
cost of ownership and reliability of the equipment to read/write these.

At some point someone is going to do the needed mechanical engineering and
that just might be the end of tape.

------
sh-run
We still use tapes at my enterprise. I'm on the network team, so I don't
really work with the tapes directly, but it doesn't seem as inconvenient as it
might sound.

We have a few large "tape libraries" in our data centers. The tape libraries
have a robotic arm that handles the bulk of the tape swapping and
organization. Humans are involved in loading the tape library and carrying the
tapes offsite for storage.

I'm speaking as someone who has had a couple of casual conversations about the
tape libraries and am not involved in the management of them in any way. They
could actually be a huge pain.

~~~
cat199
it's all about aligning the tape consumption with the size of the arrays/tape
storage so groups of tapes need to be rotated at the same time.

if done properly, it's as simple as grab this 'row' in the robot and replace
it with this 'row' from the storage area - when not, it becomes a confusing
hodgepodge of shelves and containers and which-tape-is-where.

------
TheAceOfHearts
I don't think it ever went away in larger companies.

A few months back I was looking into tape hardware, and I was disappointed to
find that the barrier of entry is too high for consumers with only dozens of
TBs. Based on my calculations at the time, for my desired data size it ended
up cheaper to just buy a bunch of HDDs.

How do HDDs compare to tape when it comes to long-term storage? I've read lots
of mixed reports.

~~~
busterarm
> I don't think it ever went away in larger companies.

Or smart companies.

heck, I evaluated tape storage for personal use. It cost way less than I
expected.

------
conception
We stopped using tape just because datasets are too large. Fulls and
differentials are not feasible at petascale. With LTO7 - a petabyte takes over
a month to backup with a single drive. You need 50 or so to pull it in a day,
assuming your storage can do 15GB/sec sustained.

~~~
fjsolwmv
50 is not a large number. What's the problem?

~~~
fencepost
I think he means that you'd need 50 tape drives with the backup running
simultaneously across all of them to run the backup in a day - fortunately
that's not how backups get run, you generally aren't running full backups
every time, you run a full then do incremental or differential backups
starting from that point with periodic full backups.

The point I caught from the article that most people are bypassing is that
tape provides a fully disconnected and unreachable (by attackers) backup,
where many online backup systems are using software and systems that may be
reachable from the systems being backed up. In the worst case of a motivated
knowledgeable skilled attacker that could mean an attacker having the ability
to wipe backups as well as live systems.

~~~
conception
This is a good point. It really depends on so many factors what a good
solution is for one's dataset.

------
soared
A relative of mine works for quantuam, a tape producer. There is some
interesting history about standardization and the big players ganging up on
the little guys.

You can also buy tape drivees online :) [https://www.newegg.com/Backup-
Drives/SubCategory/ID-46](https://www.newegg.com/Backup-
Drives/SubCategory/ID-46)

[http://www.quantum.com/](http://www.quantum.com/)

------
tantalor
How well does tape compare to DNA?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_digital_data_storage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_digital_data_storage)

~~~
new299
I'm not sure if you're kidding of not but...

Our ability to write DNA is quite limited (single fragments of ~1000bp at
most) and expensive. The largest completely synthetic fragments that have been
made would be able to store a few Megabytes of information.

I think it's potentially kind of interesting as an archival format, but even
then data retrieval is always likely to be somewhat problematic. And we're a
long way off synthesis of large datasets being practical.

~~~
ende
Oligo size isn't all that important since you geneally synthesize pools.

You're right that reading the data back is expensive (essentially a sequencing
project), but for deep archives that you would only ever retrieve in a
catastrophy, DNA has the potential to be an ideal medium.

~~~
new299
It makes it... less than ideal. And I don't believe we have good massively
parallel synthesis approaches currently. Overall writing is problematic
(reading also, but is getting cheaper/easier).

------
Glyptodon
Is it easy to accidentally erase/corrupt tapes with magnetic fields and such?

~~~
brut
IME the bigger problem is the tape reader failing and the replacement not
being able to read the old tapes...

~~~
mschuster91
You can grab virtually any old type of old tape reader over on ebay. As long
as the host system has drivers for it (IIRC even 8 years ago there were no
mainline drivers for Iomega ZIP floppies), you'll be fine.

And for really crucial data, you can always go to a data lab and have them
restore the tape; wasn't there a story a year ago or so when they found old
NASA tapes?

~~~
yuubi
A standard tape horror story is that the old drive ended up out of alignment
and later died, then the replacement, same type, was aligned properly (or just
differently) and couldn't read the existing tapes.

