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Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes

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Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes

#21
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every year you buy a new HD and yet the cost is basically zero?

Yeah what does a new HD cost? Like £100 max for a big high quality one? Compared to buying a £5k tape drive and expensive tapes... yeah that's basically zero.

$100 is definitely not "basically zero". Not only that, but a $5k tape drive and tapes are designed to last a significantly longer period of time, essentially bringing the cost of long-term storage closer to $0/year than your option of spending $100/year.

Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I store on an external HD, and every year I buy a new HD and copy across to it and verify checksums against my records. Costs basically zero and low-effort. What am I missing?

Low cost, high density and a low failure rate compared to HDs. That's why it's still used in the enterprise for backup solutions.

I don't think these are home-use concerns.

Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes

#24
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>... every year I buy a new HD... OK, but OP said: >It's really a pain to keep transferring your old backups every 2-5 years...

Because they're considering options like DVDs. With a new HD you can just copy it across in one step.

OP explicitly mentioned HDDs in their post; they do not want to be transferring data to a new HDD every year, or two years, or five years.

Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes

#25

That's good. But when will it ever move out of the enterprise market? What I really want is an affordable Tape storage for us common folks / home users to archive data long term. It's really a pain to keep transferring your old backups every 2-5 years to a new CD / DVD / portable HDD. There is a market for home users that really don't want to put their data on the "cloud". And this generation is really creating so mu…

Let's have someone invents a ultra high def head to repurpose all the old VCRs and VHS tapes :)

Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes

#26
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah what does a new HD cost? Like £100 max for a big high quality one? Compared to buying a £5k tape drive and expensive tapes... yeah that's basically zero.

$100 is definitely not "basically zero". Not only that, but a $5k tape drive and tapes are designed to last a significantly longer period of time, essentially bringing the cost of long-term storage closer to $0/year than your option of spending $100/year.

It's 50 years before $100/year catches up with a one-time cost of $5k. On top of that, the total capacity of the mediumgoes up steadily over time, while you will need to drop another $5k every 10 years or so or span your backups across multiple tapes.

Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes

#27
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they're considering options like DVDs. With a new HD you can just copy it across in one step.

OP explicitly mentioned HDDs in their post; they do not want to be transferring data to a new HDD every year, or two years, or five years.

Well that's why I asked what I'm missing! It's just one command to copy from an old HD to the new HD? Takes me all of 30 mins once a year.

Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes

#28
post #14

Last I looked into this, if you had a lot of data to back up (Say 1 Gbyte per second, continuous, with a retention time of 1 year), it was still far cheaper to simply use hard drives. One employee can keep up with all drive replacements, hardware setup, etc with time to spare. Drives aren't super power hungry, so any old office building is suitable. Encrypt the drive contents on another site so you don't need 24/7 se…

That didn’t add up. 1GB per second for a month is 2.6PB. Do you have a source of 40TB disk drives?

1GB/second for a year... Plus spare drives for redundancy, hotspotting, a test/training setup, and unplanned for increases in storage requirements.

Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes

#29

Last I looked into this, if you had a lot of data to back up (Say 1 Gbyte per second, continuous, with a retention time of 1 year), it was still far cheaper to simply use hard drives. One employee can keep up with all drive replacements, hardware setup, etc with time to spare. Drives aren't super power hungry, so any old office building is suitable. Encrypt the drive contents on another site so you don't need 24/7 se…

IANAL but you do not need to rewrite backups to brute force compliance. You need to inform your customers what your retention policy is though. I've seen large enterprises communicating backup lifetime up to 6 months after a deletion request.

Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes

#30
post #14

Last I looked into this, if you had a lot of data to back up (Say 1 Gbyte per second, continuous, with a retention time of 1 year), it was still far cheaper to simply use hard drives. One employee can keep up with all drive replacements, hardware setup, etc with time to spare. Drives aren't super power hungry, so any old office building is suitable. Encrypt the drive contents on another site so you don't need 24/7 se…

That didn’t add up. 1GB per second for a month is 2.6PB. Do you have a source of 40TB disk drives?

"to each machine" implies that there's more than one machine with 64 drives attached.
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