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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

#181

Post by sedatk »

cm2187 wrote: post #155
sedatk wrote: post #136

I'm more interested in the lifetime of the medium. Durable backup media for consumers is still a holy grail as I understand. M-DISC didn't hold up to their 1000 year lifetime promise. Archival-grade DVD's are also not good enough as I understand. Syylex went bankrupt. I want a consumer-grade backup medium that can provide at least a 100 years of lifetime. That said, I was able to recover 90% of the voice recordings m…

Given the pace at which storage capacity increases, what is the rationale for not copying over your data every 5-10 years onto the next cheapest consumer mass storage of the moment? You get all your data in one place and you don’t have to deal with standards disappearing (I read 2020’s game consoles can’t read CDs anymore, people should rip their CD collection right now).

The bookkeeping it requires for one, since you don't usually buy all your backup media at once, you acquire them over time, that gets unnecessarily complicated. It's riskier to copy the media periodically as you might increase the chances of data corruption due to the fault in the copying process (faulty RAM, faulty software, not concentrating good enough etc). You periodically introduce possibility of user/hardware/software errors to the longevity of your backups.

Also, when others inherit the media they may not have proper equipment or skill to do it themselves as goal of the preservation is to get it 100 years ahead, not keep it always in a usable state per se. For example, I'd like my children to keep my backups until my grandchildren could access them 60 years later.

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

#182

Post by bastawhiz »

eulers_secret wrote: post #171
julienb_sea wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There really isn't much market for it. You can pay Google or Apple or one of the large cloud providers a very reasonable and decreasing rate for a literal guarantee that your data is accessible. The only risk is the company goes under, which is extraordinarily unlikely for someone like Google / Apple and the shutdown would have advance notice. I realize for the hacker news audience there are multitudes of reasons the…

Wouldn’t the other risk be that after you’re dead and stop paying the data is deleted or inaccessible? Maybe if you could prepay 100 years it’d work?

If nobody is "inheriting" your data (or rather—nobody cares enough to keep your data around), it seems kind of moot to ensure it hangs around. That is, if I put stuff in an S3 bucket and pre-pay for 100 years, if nobody is around to download it in 100 years then why bother?

If you wanted to make a sort of digital time capsule and didn't care who discovered it, your next best bet would probably be the Internet Archive or some other archival community.

If your data isn't appropriate for archival (i.e., can't be publicly consumed) and isn't interesting enough for your friends/family/etc. to keep around on your behalf, keeping the data is purposeless.

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

#183

Post by claytongulick »

Causality1 wrote: post #162
throwaway201103 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> found a stack of MiniDV tapes from about 15 years ago ... I wanted to preserve them Here's where I raise my hand and ask "Why?" They've been sitting in a box for 15 years. You never watched them, you never even thought about them. Why preserve them? It's why I stopped taking pictures and videos of things. I never watched them again. It's all just a lot of waste motion over some dream that someday we'll find value i…

Just because you don't doesn't mean other people don't. May as well condemn someone for following a sport you don't like.

Asking "why" doesn't imply condemnation, does it?

At HN we assume best intention, asking why is how we learn about other people and their reasoning.

Of course it may be different than ours. But isn't that how we learn and are exposed to new ideas?

IMHO we should encourage more respectful "why?" questions.

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

#184

Post by sedatk »

dudus wrote: post #149
sedatk wrote: post #136

I'm more interested in the lifetime of the medium. Durable backup media for consumers is still a holy grail as I understand. M-DISC didn't hold up to their 1000 year lifetime promise. Archival-grade DVD's are also not good enough as I understand. Syylex went bankrupt. I want a consumer-grade backup medium that can provide at least a 100 years of lifetime. That said, I was able to recover 90% of the voice recordings m…

piql is the company that did the github arctic vault. And they offer it as a service. Maybe not for general public but still . https://www.piql.com/arctic-world-archive/

Arctic vault is VERY expensive, about $100 per gigabyte.

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

#186

Post by jeffbee »

ajnin wrote: post #152
fernly wrote: post #99

Aw, c'mon chaps! Can we just admire the tech for a second? > Data on the tape is stored at a record-breaking density of 317 gigabytes per square inch... > When tape is being read it is streamed over the head at a speed of about 15 km/h and with our new servo technologies we are still able to position the tape head with an accuracy that is about 1.5 times the width of a DNA molecule.

> 15 km/h The tape stores 580TB for a length of 1255m, does that mean the read speed is 580TB/1255m*15km/h = 1.9TB/s ? Seems too high.

That is too high but tape really does have surprisingly high transfer rates. You need a real computer to keep them streaming.

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

#187

Post by KingMachiavelli »

martyvis wrote: post #55
weare138 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually nearly every enterprise backup system my company has deployed in the last 5 years is tapeless. Most systems involve snapshot backup management that are replicated across multiple disc/SSD systems. (I'm the network guy, so not my focus area)

Tape is moving from just 'enterprise' to cloud provider enterprise. The periodic cost of having a tape storage/management system installed is a hard pill to swallow. Most companies still use tape but they just access it via AWS Glacier.

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

#188

Post by mega_dingus »

claytongulick wrote: post #183
Causality1 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because you don't doesn't mean other people don't. May as well condemn someone for following a sport you don't like.

Asking "why" doesn't imply condemnation, does it? At HN we assume best intention, asking why is how we learn about other people and their reasoning. Of course it may be different than ours. But isn't that how we learn and are exposed to new ideas? IMHO we should encourage more respectful "why?" questions.

Reread the post, especially this sentence, and ask yourself if it was "respectful"

> It's all just a lot of waste motion over some dream that someday we'll find value in sitting and looking at this old stuff again.

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

#189

Post by diveanon »

analog31 wrote: post #142

Time for the ever golden quote: Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum

When I was working in vfx we employed a guy who's sole job was to fly back and forth from LA to Melbourne with pelican cases full of hard drives.

It was faster and more secure since we were working on air gapped networks.

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

#190

Post by sedatk »

elorant wrote: post #151
sedatk wrote: post #136

I'm more interested in the lifetime of the medium. Durable backup media for consumers is still a holy grail as I understand. M-DISC didn't hold up to their 1000 year lifetime promise. Archival-grade DVD's are also not good enough as I understand. Syylex went bankrupt. I want a consumer-grade backup medium that can provide at least a 100 years of lifetime. That said, I was able to recover 90% of the voice recordings m…

The lifetime of the medium is half the equation. The biggest problem imho is the lifetime of the device. Say I give you an old floppy drive for 8" floppies from the seventies. Where would you connect it?

You're right but not all media are the same. Arctic Vault used an optical film with QR codes. You can theoretically even take its photo and decode it by hand if you want. They even added a Rosetta Stone to the entrance so, even if all the knowledge is lost, one can hypothetically decode the data stored there. For magnetic media, you need some more specialized equipment for sure.
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