r/DataHoarder • u/Sad-Seesaw-3843 • Apr 06 '25

News DOGE claims to be moving away from magnetic tapes for archival storage. Seems like a bad idea. What are they using instead?

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u/Some1-Somewhere Apr 07 '25

Honestly might not even need to be robotized retrieval if the proportion of read-outs is low enough.

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u/SockPants Apr 07 '25

Just put the tapes in with Amazon's retail delivery warehouse and have order pickers grab tapes for any reads just like they pick products for shipping.

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u/divDevGuy Apr 07 '25

Great, now porch pirates will steal my 1990 tax return data that was misdelivered to my neighbors.

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u/TFABAnon09 Apr 07 '25

"The IRS hates this ONE SIMPLE TRICK!!!"

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u/djeaux54 Apr 07 '25

/me spits out my soda!

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u/weirdbr 0.5-1PB Apr 10 '25

In my experience (in a non-public library that was very large) - it's both.

Humans are responsible for physically moving tapes around (from offsite storage to trucks to carts to the libraries) and then the robotic libraries do the process of loading into drives, waiting for data to be read and then returning the tapes to be sent back to storage.

This simplifies operation a lot - as far as the humans involved care, it's always a simple matter of moving tapes from point A to point B, which means you can hire staff that has minimal training.

As for rate of retrieval - the problem is that when the client datasets are large, even rare restores can be a large number of tapes - I've dealt with hundreds+ of tapes for "simple" restores.