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Comment by btown | Hacker News Reader

Would tape storage, a la Amazon Glacier, be an efficient way to archive these, since they don't need to be accessed except with an offline process?

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I certainly would hope so. However I'm not sure who is going to survive the longest: an organization focused on that specific goal, or a company that might change focus or go bankrupt altogether. Even though AWS is a pretty big part of Amazon (I'm guesstimating here, might be wrong), I would hope the IA would last for longer or have specific strategies to address different catastrophic scenarios that would overall make it more efficient/safe than AWS.

I recall some article that said that AWS was about 3% of Amazons income, but it was basically pure profit.

Well not pure profit because the servers cost money. The customer base is so large now that they have way more capacity than they would need for themselves.

The matching of Google's prices when they released was a good indicator of how much was profit though.

Tape needs to be taken care of just like anything else via re-tensioning and the like. There is no write and forget media as far as I can tell.

Ninja edit: That is not super price prohibitive.

> There is no write and forget media as far as I can tell.

Sure there is, you just micro-engrave it onto a nickel disc with a laser... http://blog.longnow.org/02009/05/21/what-13500-pages-micro-e...

Edit: Also paper. Low-acid paper in dry cabinets keeps a long, long time.

also the m-disc is a dvd/blueray that lasts 1000 years

.. supposedly lasts ..

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