Tape is where data goes to die. The whole purpose of this exercise is to dump stuff that's obviously no longer needed for any active business need, but where the VP responsible for IT doesn't wants to take the responsibility for authorizing the deletion of data that for some reason might some day become valuable again. So onto a tape it goes, where it every so slowly degrades and finally gets recycled into plastic bottles. I guess this is similar to the storage unit business, where garbage waits until its owner finally decides it's garbage.
Kevin Ritchey
My goodness! Maybe they can now create a Compact Cassette with decent signal-to-noise ratio so I can copy some Ramones tapes for the car. Or the topic of this article will die a slow death like everything else that becomes listed as a futuristic breakthrough.
KurtCannon
The drawback is of course is that tape is not random access. It must run through a great deal of data until it reaches the data desired. This is mostly for backup and large data transfer.
HighlanderJuan
Mag tapes were used historically for long term storage (e.g. NASA mission data) but were found to have bleed through and data loss problems if the tapes were not spun forward and rewound every several years. Some NASA mission data, before this was understood, was lost as a result. There was no comment in this article about the long term storage bleed through problem that I saw, and so that raises the question about whether or not these new tapes, as exciting as they may be, must be treated like their earlier tape technologies in order to prevent bleed through problems.
DaveWesely
I'm not sure why everyone is so down on magnetic tape storage. It's cheap and degrades slower than any other storage medium. Sure, some data is garbage. But think of digital video and photos. It can get more valuable with age. Are we, as individuals, going to be able to keep our family digital histories intact? I thought CDs and DVDs would fill that niche, but they are already becoming obsolete. Digital reel to reel tape may be the best economical long term solution.
Cloud3270
Backup and long distance data transfer. Flying a couple of these tapes to a destination might be quicker than transmitting huge amounts of data which would also eat up the network capacity.
Username
Be kind, rewind!
Kpar
I remember, a few years back, that a bunch of Hollerith cards (punch cards) were discovered in a NASA warehouse with early data from the Voyager probes. A computer class made it their project to transfer the data to magnetic media, but some data was lost due to humidity damage to the cards. Many megabytes of info had never been reviewed prior to that discovery.