[game_preservation] Long-Term Storage

[Jim Leonard]

Captain Commando wrote:

> How much are tape drives and media? I honestly can't find much 

> information on them except drive cost (about $1000). Based on hardware 

> and media cost, which do you think is better for small, medium, and 

> large organizations?


Size of the organization doesn't really matter; the needs of the 
organization is what matters, and cost can occasionally temper the 
needs.  Cost of LTO tapes and drives isn't cheap, but if they're the 
best solution, you use them.

For our datacenter, we must keep at least one copy offsite for auditing 
and disaster-recovery purposes.  That means terabytes of data must be 
physically shipped offsite every day.  Tapes are the only reasonable way 
to do this, since they easily survive a bumpy truck ride to the facility 
(whereas you can't say the same for hard drives).

In about 1.5 decades, SSD (solid-state drives, or drives made completely 
from flash memory) will be so cheap that we won't use platter-based hard 
drives any more.  At that point, we probably won't use tape either.
-- 
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org)            http://www.oldskool.org/
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