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Comment by ciupicri | Hacker News Reader

After reading reading the "Environmental and shipping specifications for LTO tape cartridges" [1] I came to the conclusion that tapes are not that great.

    Environmental   Allowable       Recommended 
    Factor          Storage         Storage
    Temperature     16 to 32°C      16 to 25°C
                    (61 to 90°F)    (61 to 77°F)

In the summer it's not unusual to reach temperatures over 30°C in the house.

There's also this story [2]:

> I had a room full of servers, many with 16-36 disks per server and had an AC failure. Things turned off as planned, but it hit 115°F [46°C] for a bit. None of the disks died, majority of the tapes did.

[1]: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/storage-deep-archive/1.3.1?topic...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21066981

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Holy cow, thank you for this. On that same IBM[1] link, it reads:

Maximum wet bulb temperature (Only LTO-8 and earlier cartridges) / Maximum Dew Point temperature (LTO-9 and later cartridges), all across the board, allowable / recommended / shipping: 26°C (79°F).

In Florida, we like to refer to 79°F dew points as "Tuesday."

More to the point, the time I want those LTO cartridges to earn their keep is during a disaster scenario. The most likely disaster scenario--other than fire--is hurricane. High temperature and humidity, and no power to run the HVAC to mitigate those. (Unless you have generators with fuel to run for days, and your HVAC, generators, and fuel tanks survived.)

Anecdotal, but...

I doubt that the recommended storage conditions for qic tapes were much different from the above; and I've seen a system boot from a qic-120 tape that had been kept in a non-climate controlled ministorage locker in Santa Fe NM for 17 years.

Oh very interesting! This isn't (currently) too much of a concern for me as I live in Wales, and though it's ridiculously humid here there's not much risk of it hitting those temperatures inside my house the vast majority of the year. I shoot a lot of photographic film as well so I'm used to storing these sorts of media, though I probably won't be shoving the tapes in the fridge beside the film. Currently they sit in my windowless office.

Here in the north of Scotland where it never really gets below 5°C or above 25°C making it t-shirt weather all year round, I think the tapes will be okay in a dry reasonably-insulated storage room.

They’re engineered like this because 99.9% of tape storage media is sold to corporations who store their backups in climate controlled buildings with backup generators.

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