LTO tape exists and should last 30 to 50 years in good storage conditions.
EDIT – that being said, "tape as a service" does exist... it's called S3 Glacier.
Except tape is now rare-bird datacenter thing. Super expensive, and hard to find drives.
The nice thing about discs is they're a mass market consumer medium, so drives have (historically) been very readily available, and they typically have backwards compatibility with old formats.
What are the threat models for tape, and how much do they vary for discs?
I assume if I leave either in my car in an Arizona summer day, it's toast. But are tapes more prone to mould damage in a damp climate, or media shedding if fed through a slightly out-of-adjustment drive?
The problem with M-disc was that it was always a sideshow on the mainstream optical disc market-- like LightScribe/LabelFlash, it was a feature most people weren't interested in except for possibly box-checking during purchase. The main audience was still people buying generic blank discs and burning single use discs or short-term backups.
There is/was an opportunity to box the product up with a clear marketing message of "here's a SMB-scale backup solution", something cheaper than tape, and more built-for-purpose than buying USB hard drives and dangling them off the back of a PC.
I'm picturing the M-disc technology but each disc is pre-installed in a cartridge to discourage accidental scratches/fingerprints/leaving surfaces directly exposed to the sun. It reinforces the "this is durable and you can probably put legal documents you might need for 5-10-20 years on it and leave it in a safe" story. This also creates a vendor-lockin product at a premium price, while quality conventional CD/DVD media was always competing with "but Fry's has spindles of 500 discs for $12.99!"
LTO is enterprise gear that is not suitable for people. If you want to waste alot of time with backups, curate your stuff and get it on optical media. Better yet, print the good stuff on archival papers and ink and stow them securely.
Optical media is an absolutely terrible format for long term archiving.
Also: I don't have a bd/dvd player in my house today, so even if there are the most tremendous gains in medical sciences I'm almost certainly not going to have one in 100+ years, so I'm not sure m disc even makes cost-sense for smaller volumes.
Maybe if you want to keep your data outside for sunshine like the author of the article, but that's not me...
You have just stumbled on the inherent problem with any archival media.
You really think you will have a working tape drive after 40 years?
Hell, in my experience tape drives are mechanically complex and full of super thin plastic wear surfaces. Do you really expect to have a working tape drive in 10 years?
As far as I can tell there is no good way to do long term static digital archives, And in the absence of that you have to depend on dynamic archives, transfer to new media every 5 years.
I think to have realistic long term static archives the best method is to only depend on the mark 1 eyeball. find your 100 best pictures, and print them out. identify important data and print it out. Stuff you want to leave to future generations, make sure it is in a form they can read.
That said, i imagine optical drives will be much the same.
That was always the hard part to justifying tape backup. the storage is cheap. but the drives are very expensive. And never seemed to last as long as their price would warrant.
The LTO compression ratio is theoretical and most peoples data will be incompatible with native LTO compression method used.
Never say never. People of today are building "90s entertainment center" setups for nostalgia, complete with VCRs. Given how many generations of game consoles had DVD drives (or BD drives that supported DVDs) in them, I would fully expect the "retro gaming" market of 100 years from now to be offering devices that can play a DVD.
Likewise for 100 years, or 200 years. etc...
ALso - Archival media that needs re-copying every 20-30 years is not Archival media by my defintion
Apparently mini discs use a different burning method (obviously) and are very very stable.
TBH, pursuing this type of nerdery is just wasting time to excuse not curating stuff.
All electronic media is bad for long term archiving. People who restore things for a living over a period of many years transition media regularly.
Anyone who has even an amateur interest in, say, making movies, probably has at least a few projects worth of 4K RAW footage they would hope outlives them. (And the average small-time YouTube content creator has far more.)
If anything I doubt they'll bother looking at the final cut.
I just use a box full of old harddrives now, i basically use those like tape cassettes.
Re: hard drives – I gave up entirely on the idea of storing backups "at rest" indefinitely, and use two NASes at different sites. I only store ~50TB, and I plan to need to recover every five years (e.g. when a working computer finally gives up the ghost.) I end up replacing a HD in a ZFS pool once every two years.
Buying hardware to keep 15 disks spinning is also pretty expensive :(
New computers don't have them and haven't for a few years. I purchased a drive recently and to get a quality drive, I had to go for a NOS pioneer drive, or get another LG, and the LG drives are kid-of shit.
I'd love some kind of external tape drive that I can connect with USB-C, or USB-3...
But everything is SAS? And no way to convert SAS to SATA?
Recommendations?
I still have a ZIP drive around with a parallel port connector. I haven’t owned a computer with a parallel port in 20+ years.
I probably also have a QIC-80 tape drive around somewhere.
I just looked, and iomega.com seems to be some kind of malware site. Sad.
LTO drives are expensive but they are very well designed and it is the most reliable portable storage format available. Full LTO tapes in a good fire rated safe really provide a fantastic sense of security. The cost of the drive is amortized over the total bytes you store.
After the fire, it is likely that the tapes and the papers in the safe are a pile of ash. Fire-rated safes often don't survive fires especially if you live in wildfire country.
I know MagStor has one with usb-c presentation.