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U.S. Gov't eliminates tape data storage at the GSA to save $1M per year, but tape isn't dead yet
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this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2025
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United States | News & Politics
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Tape storage is great for backups and archival storage.
Maintaining it physically is very well understood.
The tapes are physically disconnected from the tape drive, so it's extremely difficult to get accidentally (or maliciously) overwritten/tampered.
They are much more resilient to bit rot & data degregation.
And for things like archival & backup, the extremely slow (or impossible) random access isn't an issue.
Modern LTO is as fast as an SSD, and has huge data density.
They might save 1m per year over the next few years, but I imagine the savings will reduce as the cost of maintaining HDDs increases.
I have personally benefitted from getting month old backups from tape storage when a major file got corrupted. It took a couple days and a service ticket, but it resurrected a very large file that we could not have easily recreated otherwise. The specifics of how tape backup work made this possible. I guess you could have stuff in cd media and shit, but I’m guessing the tapes can do large quantities and stay good longer assuming they’re cared for.