My day job (company died a couple of weeks ago). We had > 100,000 LTO tapes in the end. With data archived way back in 2002 until present. We were still regularly restoring data. In our busiest years we were doing what averaged to 177 restores per day (365 days a year). Barely any physically destroyed tapes.

I see a few articles citing robotic failures as a big issue, but really someone can just place a tape in the robot if critical recovery is needed and the robot has died.

Curious to hear more details about your previous job? What were you doing to require 100k tapes?

Vfx Every commercial, movie or TV worked on would have the assets used to create the content archives.

Tape is reliable and suitable for long term archiving, but it still needs care and feeding.

Having some kind of parity data recorded so losing a single tape does not result in data loss, routine testing and replacement of failing tapes, and a plan to migrate to denser media every x years are all considerations.

Spinning rust just feels simple because the abstractions we use are built on top of a substrate that assumes individual drive (or shelf) failure. Everybody knows that if you use hard drives you'll need people to go around and replace failing hardware for the entire lifetime of the data.

There's a biiiiiiiiiig asterisk on all tape storage, about temperature and humidity. It's not like paper that you can leave in an attic for a century and still find readable.

People restoring old tapes right now have to do all sorts of exotic things with solvents to remove the mildew and baking the tapes to make the emulsion not immediately fall off the substrate, etc. I have to imagine that at today's density, any such treatment would be much worse for the data.

So those tapes are only as immortal as their HVAC. One hot humid summer in the wrong kind of warehouse may be it.

Similarly, I worked at a place where, before I joined, a system upgrade gone wrong had caused the retrieval of backup tapes stored in a metal safe, where the safe's temperature had been below the dew-point. Neither the tape cases nor the safe were sealable against moisture. This meant they had no backups of data they were required to retain for five years. And of course, the person who attempted the upgrade resigned.

This is mentioned in the article.

There's an old presentation from Google where they mentioned that they were the only ones who read back their tapes to make sure they work.