Musk's DOGE muzzled on X over tape storage baloney There is something about Elon Musk's career trajectory that compels onlookers to hang around for the seemingly inevitable crash landing. Tesla, SpaceX, and X – formerly known as Twitter – have all become hosts to the man's galactic ego. The latest embodiment of his comic book fantasies (he described himself as "dark, gothic …
AFAIK modern tape cartridges (Don't call them "Cassettes") have some chippery in them but are mostly passive devices which can (under sufficient provocation) be taken apart and the tape extracted and still be read.
Everything else used either a lot of devices (like USB and SD cards) or wraps the media with a lot of hardware, IE hard drives.
BTW AFAIK the seismic recordings of surveys for oil and gas are still stored on tapes on reels (about 20MB/tape IIRC) because it's a)Already existing there b)they already have the drives to read and write it c)Every time the rendering software improves they effectively re-run a "Virtual survey,*" in the hope of flushing out some more black gold.
*Running a modern real survey over the same ground in 2025 would be ridiculously expensive
A lot of MAM as it's called is standard, and (judging by IBM's docs) *ridiculously* well-documented and openly accessible. There's bound to be manufacturer-specific extensions (where are there not) but you can happily live a full life never knowing about them.
Okay, but as far as those (much) older reel-based tapes are concerned, 20MB might have been a lot back then, but it's nothing by modern standards.
So I'd have thought that- rather than *having* to go back to the original tapes and drives every time that data is required- they would simply have copied the data once to more modern (and importantly, more easily-accessible) storage at some point? I mean, presumably it's digital in the first place, so even if they wanted to re-analyse the data, it wouldn't matter whether they used the original tapes or the copy?
They could certainly retain the original tapes for archival purposes- I'm not suggesting they bin them. But surely they shouldn't actually *need* to go back to them every time they need the data?
How often do they need that old data? As stated, only when a new analysis method appears and it seems worthwhile to re-work the old data. Which doesn't feel like it would occur even once a month...
So it may simply still be as cost effective to have an old tape be mounted, let the new software run over it for a day or two, swap tapes... As you say, 20MB per reel is not a lot so if the chap is mounting new tapes to archive new data a few times a day anyway then - he may be grateful for the foray into the stacks to break up the routine!
It seems that, if that happens once a month, having a single hard drive with a hundred thousand scans on it might still have a lot of efficiency benefits compared to loading a hundred thousand tapes. If it's fewer scans, then you don't even need a reserved hard drive for it. How expensive must it be to either manually cycle the tapes through a drive or to buy and maintain robots to do it, and how much tape reading overhead must that add to the process of testing the new scanning step?
And getting operators to mount thousands of reels would also be ruinously expensive. The point of cartridges is automation, not just density. I used to analyze EU trade data that arrived as one dataset split across half a dozen 1/2" tape reels that had to be mounted one after the other. I could transfer this on to a single cartridge that would be mounted by a robot in a silo. There is no reason that digital round tape would need to be kept for re-analysis in perpetuity.
Of course if it was analog, it would be totally different - modern techniques could probably recover the voices of the operators and whatever was on the local radio at the time.
Good point.
I think these are the digitised samples of the original tracks taken straight off the geophones, which are basically microphones with really low frequency response.
There was an article in DDJ many years ago about this. IIRC they were sampled at 12 or 14bits. The article was about hosting mainframe class apps on a PC. I think it referred to something called "DISPLA"?
19-year-old DOGE kid: "What's tape?"
Old fart:"It's a long piece of plastic magnetic storage media in a cartridge."
19-year-old DOGE kid: "Back it up in the Cloud with S3 Glacier Deep Archive. Don't know how it's done, but it's in the Cloud so it must be perfect."
Old fart: "S3 Glacier Deep Archive is tape."
19-year-old DOGE kid: "What's tape?"
<infinite loop>
> Everything else used either a lot of devices (like USB and SD cards) or wraps the media with a lot of hardware, IE hard drives.
Optical media (eg DVD-R) is also entirely passive. With good blanks and decent storage it also has good longevity. At least 20 years is no problem for in my experience (that is going by the oldest DVD-R's I have).
Never seen a failure in 5 years. I guess I have managed to avoid the bad ones, then. What I have are mostly Fujis, Maxels, TDKs, Sonys and Verbatims, but when one looks at the packaging, most actually came from some company named Ritek. I once did a small "accelerated aging" test, where I hung a sample of DVD-R:s on an outer wall, exposed to varying temperatures and sunlight. The winner? "Octron", which at the time was a house label sold in Lidl stores (havent seen it for a long time). But that too was really a Ritek.
I'm just happy the Government DOES backups of stuff, and that they work (or at least they should).
Now, if they should be using LTO 9 or newer (they should) and some near-online caching on newer media (probably a good idea) I'd leave to the experts, not DOGE.
As long it isn't on reel-to-reel 9 track tapes anymore, I'm ok.
They do backups? Funny because whenever someone asks an awkward FOI they have lost the data.
As for Signal, they may as well authorise a safe & secure auto-erasing system because it is only saving money rather that having people fly around and talk in bathrooms with the taps running. As for the specific Signal incident, please tell me it was a leak not an accident? Surely, they cannot be that stupid? Oh ...
"IIRC, reel-to-reel 9 tracks tapes are required (by law) for certain treaty obligations"
If there's any new use for the data, it could make sense to copy it to a higher capacity cartridge to keep the mileage off of the originals so they are stored deep under the mountain and able to be read for much longer.
"to save "$1 million per year by converting 14,000 magnetic tapes (70-year-old technology for information storage) to permanent modern digital records.""
Risking petabytes in backups to convert them to, what exactly? DVD? Spinning Rust? SSD?
These are all very expensive in maintenance, and require frequent refreshing.
And that saves only $1M?
I’m not normally a conspiracy theorist, but does anyone else wonder if at least part of the reason is vulnerability to hackers. Tapes in a warehouse tend to be relatively difficult to access because someone may actually have to go there and I would hope they have serious physical security protecting them. Putting them in some sort of cloud storage would make them accessible to hackers and much easier for Russia, China or any other foreign state to access.
I can see why DOGE might quite like that.
sure, put it all on onedrive, it'll be safe there. Bet Microsoft would give musk a great deal, and if you ever find you can't get it back, well you should have been more careful with your security. terms and conditions say we don't guarantee this is appropriate for your usage.
"I'm still scratching my head on how converting tapes you already have (you know, paid for and done) to something new saves anything. "
Only for certain specific cases. The mention of the data from oil exploration studies might be one. While a new analysis method might only be employed every couple of years to reanalyze the data, making it easier to do so by not having to change tapes could make it more cost-effective to do more studies with the data.
I know with my own archives is that the data almost never gets accessed so doing any work on transferring it so some other form is a waste of time. I used to spend time going through files and tossing out stuff that was a jpg version of a bigger tiff file I made to hand to a customer. With storage so cheap, spending my time to do that was a net waste of time/money. Now I wind up with plenty of used HD's to format and use for archives if they check out. Chances are my later files will be needed far more than the ones from ages ago. Those archives are on more modern media, though I think at this point I don't have a single SCSI drive left anywhere.
Also, "permanent modern digital records"? I'm going to assume that the original tapes were "digital" as well?
I fucking hate the modern misuse of "digital" as a synonym for (a) purely file-based non-(tied-to-specific)-physical media (with the implication that all physical media are "analogue"- like, er, DVDs?), (b) anything based around "online" services or worst of all, (c) any remotely "modern" tech being compared against its older counterpart (which magically becomes analogue as soon as it's twenty-plus years old and/or obsolescent).
Fuckwits.
(In an attempt to stem the flow of downvotes)
I was attempting to poke fun at my own historic pedantry making me want to point out that digital is not synonymous with binary. Yes, we're very often talking about binary encoded data, but that's not universal.
And that my minor point is now eclipsed by what Michael Strorm's comment is referring to.
> the implication that all physical media are "analogue"
That's an almost universal misconception amongst our 1st year Eng students, and probably the young in general.
To them, digital media is only what is in the computer/cloud. Absolutely anything else, from granddads LPs (OK) to dads CDs/DVDs (ummm), is always analogue.
It's something we need to explain every year.
> Absolutely anything else [including] dads CDs [..] is always analogue
I'm aware of that perception, but it's ironic considering the main selling point of CDs was that they *were* digital, to the extent it was part of the official logo that appeared on almost every CD player in the early days.
(You could probably bookmark or save that to make the point, too).
>>covered with the magnetic substrate
Which was, in the good old days..... rust coloured (might have had iron in it - but I can't find a reference for that and so am working from memory of the internals of RA80/1s and removable disk packs).
Hence "spinning rust" as a slang/IT dialect term for storage based on HDD technology.
In the early days of magnetic media, the magnetic material was indeed iron oxide. It's stable and was very cheap. If you have any cassette tapes around, the tape is most likely to be brown for this reason (although dark grey is a colour associated with chrome ferochrome and metal tapes). It's difficult to tell the colour of LTO tapes, because you basically never see the tape any more as it's totally enclosed in the cartridge, and you only really see it if the end tab did not lock back in to the cartridge when it was ejected, or the tape or cartridge is broken. If you take apart a modern hard disc, the surface is most likely to be silver.
As data densities increased, more esoteric materials were used to decrease the size of the magnetic domains.
I have to admit that your distinction between disc and platter seems a bit arbitrary. They're both round and flat. The term 'platter' only really started being used when computer DASD/hard drives/discs started having more than 2 surfaces, requiring more than one actual disc. At that time, the media was often still called a disc or disc pack, but the individual circular pieces of metal/glass were called platters, so a 'disc' was often made up using multiple platters. And remember, when disc drives started being seen on computers, more often than not, the disc/disc pack was removable, and the disc drive was the separate device used to read the discs.
The industry moved to glass from aluminium for the platters when the track density increased enough that the thermal expansion of the metal became a problem, and when the spin speed increased to the point where aluminium would distort due to the high speeds and accelerations. You used to be able to tell when an aluminium pack contained a disc was bent or distorted by how it sounded when it was spinning.
Country specifics.
I was actually deliberately resisting the urge to type disk rather than disc, because of being on the RHS of the pond (and vainly trying to maintain the nationality of The Register). IBM used to call it Direct Access Data Device (DASD) and many of the long-term IBMers that I came across never used either disk or disc, unless they were referring to floppies.
Disc would have been used in the UK, were it not that most computer companies originated in the US (at least those that survived for any time) so most documentation written in English would have come from the US unaltered.
As an example, documentation from Ferranti, English Electric or ICL (early UK based computer manufacturers) seems to have used "disc" most of the time.
A difference in attitudes, as well:
The UK created BBC micro would let you do both *DISK as well as the proper *DISC, but to start coding in Pascal[1] from The Other Place, you were only allowed PROGRAM.
[1] named after someone who would have preferred *DISQUE
Still, it did mean that we could say the BBC was broadcasting a good programme about programs and not be confused whether the subject matter was computers or the making of fine historical dramas.
This post has been deleted by its author
Head of the European commission is accountable to the commission, which is accountable to the European parliament, which is accountable to European citizens, a group whose membership was taken from me against my will. And the European commission cared more about it's citizens than the UK government of the time did.
Yeah, but in theory the US has a system of checks and balances, where Congress, Senate, and Supreme Court are supposed to reign in a rogue president.
They seem to be rather notoriously absent, save for judges whose rulings Trump just blatantly ignores. That kind of criminal activity should justify immediate impeachment for violation of his oath of office, but when the government is comprised of lapdogs and spineless cowards for the most part, that is incredibly unlikely to happen before the mid terms.
I expect physically violent riots in the US long before the midterms if the idiot in charge remains unchecked. In fact, I expect it within 2-3 months!
Oh, great idea. Give Thumper the excuse to declare yet another state of emergency and, if he feels like it, martial law in sanctuary cities.
You know he'd do it. And good luck reining him in at the midterms then. Someone who controls the movement of people has absolutely enormous power to manipulate an election.
"Head of the European commission is accountable to the commission, which is accountable to the European parliament, which is accountable to European citizens"
It never ceases to amaze me how little people who want to defend the EU know about the EU. I wonder if there's a correlation.
The head of the European Commission is accountable to NOBODY - least of all the European Parliament. Research the European Commission itself publishes makes this incredibly clear. European Commissioners themselves lose their pension if they listen to voters, it's right there in the rules of the road. They have an oath, maybe your should read what that oath says.
Something about, what was it? Oh, right:
"in the performance of my tasks, neither to seek nor to take instructions from any Government or from any other institution, body, office or entity"
The only people who know anything whatsoever about the European Commission and defend that are either incredibly stupid or former Commissioners themselves - usually both at the same time. Probably because they don't want to lost their _incredibly_ generous pension.
The EU is not a democracy, it has never been a democracy and wants nothing less than to be a democracy. It's not even a French and German project to control the rest of Europe - you could forgive it a little bit maybe if it was; it's something much more nefarious than that. Nor is it a corporatocracy despite showing many of the trappings; it's a hybrid of a few evil systems, but leans towards a sort of authoritarian technocracy.
The oath obviously means that commissioners should be impartial and uphold EU treaties for the good of the EU as a whole, not that they are accountable to nobody.
If you think that oath is the smoking gun then please do continue with a WEF conspiracy theory or something.
But it doesn't mean that at all. It's about Commissioner independence from EVERYBODY. They're supposed to operate at their own "look how smart we are" level where they're totally untouchable. They exist to protect the Commission's power base, and they do so incredibly dutifully.
Even if it meant that (and to be clear, again, it doesn't), that isn't how it works in practice.
In theory, there's the Parliament as it's own power base, but they can't initiate legislation, they can't fundamentally change legislation, they can't really in any practical way vote against legislation - all because of the Trilogue system. They can argue, they can protest, they can say "this far and no further" - what happens in these sessions? We know not, because they're totally secret and anybody who tells doesn't survive - not that they ever tell. All we know is the Commission _always_ wins - not mostly wins, not usually wins, ALWAYS wins. The EU Commission itself commissioned and published a report about Trilogue subtitled "Where European democracy goes to die". Not a thing has changed since that report was published.
Does that actually sound like checks and balances to you? Does that really sound like European Parliament has real powers?
Err: "The European Commission is held democratically accountable by the European Parliament, which has the right to approve and dismiss the entire political leadership of the Commission"
https://commission.europa.eu/about/organisation/how-commission-appointed_en
European Parliament, which has the right to approve and dismiss the entire political leadership of the Commission"
And that's all it can do. It can dismiss the *whole* commission, or do nothing, so unless it does something so bad that the parliament dumps them all, the commission is pretty much untouchable.
This post has been deleted by its author
Head of the European commission is accountable to the commission, which is accountable to the European parliament, which is accountable to European citizens
Well, on paper at least.
If you remember the Edith Cresson scandal the parliament can't actually fire individual commissioners, all it can do it dismiss the whole commission en bloc, which is a pretty nuclear option. It means that the commission is largely a power unto itself, the whole commission would have to behave really badly to be actually held accountable.
I'd also be extremely surprised if enough citizens among the 27 member states would ever be able to reach a majority agreement to influence the parliament.
membership was taken from me against my will
At least you got a vote on the issue, we didn't get a say in it's creation or on our membership You still have the option of becoming a citizen of another member country, if it's really that important to you.
The UK had no say abut the creation of the European Community.
In 1975 the UK had a referendum over staying in the Common Market (European Community) having been taken in without a vote. So we sort of had a say.
There was never a referendum about it becoming a European Union. No say there.
In 2016 The referendum was to leave the Union, which the electorate voted for.
If it had not become a European Union rather than a free trade community then the UK would probably still be a member.
"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’
Winston S Churchill, 11 November 1947
The USA seems to be turning from a Democracy to a Dictatorship with the number of Executive Orders which are being issued. Some democracies are more democratic than others............
At the point of WW3, the total and utter destruction of the World...
The thing you're bothered about is your savings? And taxes? And inflation?
Good to know I suppose..
I can just picture the scene in the control room now:
Sir, we need to fire nukes at China
Son, you know how much the tariffs are on sending things to China? We just can't afford it!
Sir, Elon Musk is on the phone. He says there's an underperforming Tesla dealer he'd like to send 'a message' to.
We're at war with the World and THAT'S what he's bothered about?
He also says he saved a million dollars in pensions clawbacks and he'll give it to you if you'll just press that flashing button on your console..
von der Leyen does not have absolute power: there are simply too many representatives and bureaucrats in the way. Irrelevant to the principle, but she also makes comparative sense when speaking, both on and off the golf course. "Comparative" doing the heavy lifting there, but still
> "Comparative" doing the heavy lifting there
Much like my qualifying "almost".
Intriguing that the downvotes all attack my nobody's-perfect aside and not my elevation of von der Leyen to LotFW as such. One even got the B word in. Such fanatical support for her is touching. Of course you are right: if she did have absolute power then LotFW is the last thing she would be.
But I still maintain that the Commission leads the Council of Spineless Procrastinators Ministers by the nose most of the time, and she is undeniably its head.
In the 1980s the BBC had a building at the Daventry transmitter where they recycled old audio & video tapes and spliced together the good bits to make new reels from old. Then someone realised that destroying their priceless archive to save a few bob wasn’t such a great idea.
Magnetic tape described as "the most cost-effective and stable medium for long-term storage" is more than slightly, well, off.
Optical media is probably the most cost effective and stable (certainly most stable) medium for long term storage. In addition, it is getting hard to acquire new recording tapes, as well as drives, let alone repair parts for drives.
So, while I understand the slant here at El Reg is to be as negative as possible toward anything done under the current US administration, bending the facts goes a little far for my taste. A little balance would be welcome, but I'm not likely to aee that, I guess.
It is debatable as to whether converting from long-unused, recorded tape to optical would be a cost effective endeavor universally, but in cases where there is a concern about the long term integrity of data which might actually be useful, or the ability to read it, this should certainly be migrated, and all new long term, offline storage should be switched to optical.
What optical format do you prefer? There's Archival Disk, which is indeed designed to last fifty years and it holds a grand total of 1 TB per disk. Compared to the 18 TB per LTO9 cartridge, or even the 6 TB per cartridge if they're still using LTO7 from 2015, that's not a lot of bytes. It has one other problem though: it's been discontinued and it wasn't replaced with something newer. Other optical media I'm aware of has significantly lower per-disk capacity. So what specific optical disk do you want to use, and how do you expect it will handle the efficiency problems that tape libraries are designed to respond to?
Those capacity values for LTO tape you quoted are for the raw capacity. All LTO tape drives have data compression that is 2-2.5x and does not slow down data speeds, so your 18TB on an LTO9 actually becomes more like 40TB in actual use (depending on the type of data being backed up). This is what we achieve in real use.
That is true, but I don't give them a lot of credit for that as a lot of systems can apply compression before sending the data to the media. I could compress something before writing it to optical or other media too, and although that would increase the CPU load because I'm making the original source of data do the compression rather than being able to outsource it to the drive, it generally wouldn't increase it enough to change the speed with which the data is written or read. It's also more adaptable to other types of data. If I have data that I can compress better than 2.5X, then I'll be able to store even more per cartridge, and if I'm storing data that's already been compressed, chances are that the LTO compression algorithm will not further compress it. I think it's most honest to compare like with like, which means raw capacities.
I can't speak confidently as to its relative merits, but your claims about magnetic media aren't factual.
Both cartridges and drives are still in ample supply; based on a quick search both are available from: Amazon, Walmart, NewEgg, B&H Photo, and more. Essentially the same list as M-Disc, which I guessed to be a fair optical comparison.
I think that you have to quantify this.
If you want to buy 2400' 800bpi reel-to-reel tapes, you may struggle, and you would definitely not find new drives for these.
Like most things, tape has families and generations, and older tape/drives do become obsolete. Just off the top of my head, I think that the following tape types would be difficult to read now. 1/2" 2400', DecTape1/2, QIC (all densities), DLT (all densities), 8mm, 4mm DAT, IBM 3480, all StorageTek cartridges, and both types of Magstar tape.
Even the current poster boy of tape, LTO has compatibility which only go back two generations. Your fancy LTO9 tape drives, which are very much still available, can't read LTO6 or before tapes (and I can't remember the matrix, there was somewhat of a break in compatibility around LTO7/8 IIRC).
So the tape medium may well, and does, last decades, but you have to remember to maintain enough of the correct types of drives and systems to be able to read them. And this often also requires systems to attach them to. Even tradditionsl SCSI, which you could probably find drives for most of these tape types is getting really rare on modern day computing hardware.
But I would still trust tape over most writeable optical media that is not speciffically intended for archival purposes. You just have to be prepared to keep it working.
@Lewis R "In addition, it is getting hard to acquire new recording tapes, as well as drives, let alone repair parts for drives."
This is a very skewed assertion as there is no storage technology for which the "repair ancient tech" problem does not exist. I mean, try plugging in your ESDI or ST506 drives!
I mean, try plugging in your ESDI or ST506 drives!
There is, somewhere in these sceptered isles [1], an ancient 330M ESDI drive-powered linux box. Or, at least, there was 3 months ago [2]. It was my first linux box (heated up the spare room nicely and we had to keep the door shut because it was *loud*. I brought it at a computer fair - 2nd hand and it came with its own ESDI interface card (ISA bus).). Once i'd got my next computer, the old one went to a friend and he's run it ever since.
I suspect you can probably get ESDI drive interface card but finding an ISA-bus computer to put them in might be more challenging nowadays.
[1] What an odd saying..
[2] Haven't spoken in a while..
All of the orgs that use tape on a daily basis don't seem to have an issue finding supplies of tape and new tape machines.
Perhaps you're trying to interpret their "70 year old" tech description to mean they are working with tape reels that are ancient, and therefore hardware options are limited. But no information was provided to support that take.
Given the Musk/DOGE track record, it's far more likely that they immediately consider any old tech automatically obsolete without any understanding or analysis.
I'm curious too what optical system that would be.
As an ordinary person I've used DVDs and have good luck with ordinary DVDs. And I could go to an archival DVD for about $8/4.7GB. But I'd like to know, because I'm not getting a good feeling that the industry remains committed to them.
How many DVDs are you talking about here? Shouldn't take too long transfer from tape ;)
Or maybe you're talking about Project Silica under development. When could I get one of those?
That's why you have more than one of them. If you're comparing to DVDs, the price comparison lets you have a lot more copies on hard drives than it would take to store the lot on archival DVDs. Let's see exactly how much, storing exactly one terabyte. At $8 per archival DVD, a terabyte is $1,743. I can buy 1 TB hard drives, if using US dollars, for $40, probably lower if I searched for more than thirty seconds or was buying in bulk, and buying in bulk is exactly what I'm going to do because, for my $1,743, I can store 43 copies. Which do you think is more likely to survive? 43 redundant versions of which only one needs to work or 218 disks, the failure of one of which is sufficient to break everything?
I think that you jest, but I'm sure it would be possible to put some data exfiltration mechanism into a drive, but the actual mechanism of sending the data back might be problematic. I guess you could build in a mobile data hot-spot to run through the (possibly non-existent) hidden data channels in the Huawei 5G mobile infrastructure, but since that was ripped out in the UK, you'll probably have to have mobile data hardware and a valid eSIMs in the devices, or put enough intelligence to allow the device to go out through any network on the computer the device is sitting in.
I agree with what you say to a point.
The issue I have is that you're not really just talking about a number of hard drives. You're actually talking about hard drives and the hardware to attach them to a system. If you look at SAN storage devices, the drives are not the most expensive part of the systems.
I know that there were hardware devices that put hard drives in cassettes so that they could be attached and detached from shared controllers, and I seem to vaguely remember a hard drive library with a robot to move the drives around. But it is a product that faded into myth, and Commvault "PnP Disk Libraries" are not what I'm referring to. And I know that many systems have disks in removable carriers so that they can be removed from a system without powering the system down, but I've not seen anything to automate that type of device movement.
By comparison, both removable optical media and tape have a passive media with little to no active components. This should make them cheaper, allow the drives to read/write them to be better engineered, and also lend themselves to automated loaders or libraries.
I think I'd have a better chance getting a robotic loader for disks rather than DVDs. I can't say I've had to do either, but I'm aware of the disk-loading libraries you refer to, whereas I'm unaware of anything that could store and load the 218 DVDs I need for nonredundant storage of a terabyte. I imagine that those five-disk CD changers will need a bit of an update to be adequate to this task. If we don't have either, then I would much rather have to load 43 hard drives into a bay, of which there are many hotswap-capable ones, than to load 218 DVDs into a slot, wait for them to be written, and keep track of their order later. Neither would be fun, but one is faster, more parallel if I've got a few free bays, and I don't have to worry too much about ordering.
"I think I'd have a better chance getting a robotic loader for disks rather than DVDs. "
CD/DVD juke boxes have existed for decades. And I don't mean the 4 or 5 disc devices in PCs. I mean the CD/DVD equivalent of the music juke boxes with 50+ 7" singles in them :-)
I'm not sure it could be called a "robot" though, at least not in the terms you imply, eg "robot arms" inserting/removing items.
Well, there was a robot specifically for optical media at a bank I worked for that had a capacity of 1000 CDs or DVDs with two player slots that was entirely controlled and searchable by the management software on it.
It existed to serve the legal requirement for a 7 year immutable search history of the bank transactions, I believe.
This was a pretty much retired unit by 2000 and it's data was going to "age out" in a couple more years.
The newer models were bigger and faster...
We do know if they're Warner Brothers DVDs, 17 years.
Check your DVDs for disc rot — Warner Bros. says it’s replacing them
Me too. DVD-R and CD-R are useless as a long term backup solution. I have a bunch of backup discs ranging from 10 to 15 years old and half of them are only just readable (with many retries) and some are not readable at all. On the other hand I own an old spinning rust backup drive (120GB) that is over 20 years old and still works perfectly (it only gets plugged in now and then). I do have other copies of the data that is on that drive as I don't expect it to last forever, but it always amazes me that whenever I plug it in it jumps into life and is no noisier than the day I bought it.
DVD has a shit lifetime. I can get a 48 or 96 tape library with 4 drives in it for relatively peanuts in enterprise terms. Running at fibre speeds.
Backup to disk then disk to tape automatically without thinking. I can leave those tapes on a shelf for 50 years and I know they'll be mostly fine. I can look at a dvd and it will scratch.
Each tape holding 45TB compressed, that's 4.3PB for the hpe ones at around £60/tape. Cheaper if you're getting enterprise pricing
"Optical media is probably the most cost effective and stable (certainly most stable) medium for long term storage"
No. Depends on the media - M-disc claimed very long storage, but they are out of business now. Verbatim (and maybe a few others) still makes some disc, but their storage capability doesn't match tapes. And M-disc are write only. Other "archive" optical discs format are less capable, or are already discontinued, like the Sony ODA.
Backup/archive tapes are not the Commodore 64 cassette storage. Data is stored using redundancy and error correction. And they can be faster than burning an optical disc. It's also easier for automatic tape libraries to manage tape carridges than disc - not surprisingly Sony ODA used discs inside a cartridge.
"In addition, it is getting hard to acquire new recording tapes as well as drives, let alone repair parts for drives."
False. It became a niche market for large storage needs, but you can find them even on Amazon if you wish so. Of course, very few woudl build today a tape library themselves, but very small ones. Companies like Fujitus, HP and IBM will happily sell you what you need. Still these are not the systems you see advertised by youtube influencers...
Now if it was an old, outdated tape library it does make sense to upgrade it. But it could still be a new tape library
Not at all. CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs all deteriorate faster than tape, store far less per disk than a tape does, and requires several times the number of storage management robots as a result.
But of course Muscolini's sycophants gape-mouthed drooling conclusion is that he "must" by "smarter" than everyone else in IT. *LOL*
I looked and CERN uses tape for their petabytes a day data streams.
So, that really works and has worked for some time now. It sounds like a solid solution. I doubt whether DOGE even has the expertise to do better.
"Because each use case varies."
Indeed, when you don't need decades long cold storage of petabytes if data, other options are cheaper and more convenient.
But the article was about petabytes of data in cold storage for decades. So, tapes would probably be the more secure and cheaper option.
I don't, and for two, very good reasons. Tape drives are expensive. If you want to buy an LTO drive and use it to write like three tapes, you end up spending a lot more for that than buying hard drives or even SSDs to store the same information. If you want to buy one drive and read thirty tapes, the numbers start comparing better. So when you have massive amounts of data to store like decades of government records, tape starts making sense again. The other problem is that it's not random access, so retrieving the data from the tape takes longer. Also not a problem for their use case, but not so useful for me.
I haven't used it, haven't tested it, etc, etc, but noting for fairness: M-Disc claims "up to 1000 years" of longevity (i.e. subject to storage environment, naturally). At the very least it's an optical media that you and I can buy that has tried specifically to optimise for that.
The Biden-era NIST rated it as acceptable for 100-year storage.
I think even that that’s pushing it, I mean we’re still using tape after 70 years, when was the last time we used a CD? 20 years ago? or a DVD? 10 years ago? I have 15 year-old LTO tapes and written DVDs, and I’ll bet my ass the tapes have a higher recovery ratio.
Nevermind the whole “R+W R-W” nonsense that never birthed an actual archival format.
Nevermind twice that modern CFS/incremental/rotating tape backups. Most of that is inaccessible to any current optical storage, and the portions that do work would go through an absolutely incredible amount of media, with their attendant higher error ratio just through sheer units of media.
Nevermind-on-the-gripping-hand pretesting media, I can test and read back a tape, but there is a reason DVD and CD media (both R and RW) had a “write test area“.
NIST's conclusion was based on a metasurvey of empirical scientific measurement and M-Disc is designed for archival; it is distinct from standard writable optical media — e.g. it requires a newer, specifically-compatible drive.
The underlying studies did in part compare to standard media and find it to be essentially useless.
The fact that it’s a proprietary process owned by a company that’s already gone bankrupt once makes me question a few things. I see some of the competitors in the space have also done bankrupt. At the very least the media would need to be readable in commodity hardware, but LTO is an open standard from top to bottom, and this is both proprietary and appears to have competing standards. If they end up, settling on a standard for both chemistry and technology, yeah I suppose the larger discs would be a good contender for smaller back ups like home or small office. You still need some kind of disc flipper if you want to take more than a couple hundred gig of back up whereas nowadays you might need to swap tapes once for a 30Tib array.
All of those things may be true, none affects any argument I've made.
Again, for clarity: the statement "The writable optical media I own have all rot within a decade." is representative of the optical media either you or I have likely ever created but it is not true of all optical media.
Going further than that: let's take it as given that you're correct about the net benefit of magnetic. Then there's really no need to support false statements about the potential longevity of optical — which are still the only thing I'm taking issue with. Just take that issue off the table and then discard optical based on magnetic's other merits.
You need to be extremely careful with tape. I've had issues with humidity causing the tape to stick together and then de-laminate when it was played. These were old DC600 cartridges that had just been stored on a shelf. I would assume that these newish tapes are stored in an environmentally controlled area.
And just watch out for hurricanes/cyclones etc.
> I would assume that these newish tapes are stored in an environmentally controlled area.
Where I work we have a large archive building. And, in one *very* protected area, we have the cellulose film archive - each film kept carefully separate in fire-resistant cases.
(Cellulose film decays into, basically, what used to be called gun-cotton)
Remember when Trump attacked McCain?
"He's not a war hero."
"He's a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured, okay? I hate to tell you." (said by someone who avoid service, and didn't fight for his country...). Don't know probably he thinks the same about people like Gregory "Pappy" Boyington, who was captured by the Japanese as well. Or those who fought at Corregidor...
"We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral.
"What the fuck are we doing that for? Guy was a fucking loser"
Probably this is plain envy. He's a coward. He hate people like McCain or Zelensky who show to be really bold, while he can only pretend to be.
Musk his probably basing this on how Twitter 'back up' their data, which is probably they dont they just replicate it to some other servers and don't have offline backups, as lets be honest no one is really going to care or notice if some Tweets disappear that were written in 2017 where government data has sometimes legally be kept indefinitely or at least for decades.
I know it’s popular to bash DOGE, but has no one had an LTO tape go bad before? Or had one broken / mangled by a bad drive? Then there’s also the storage and handling of the tapes themselves that incurs extra costs. How many here have dumped tape? Why did you switch?
And without details, why is “a service run by disabled vets” important? Do we know if the service was being provided correctly and wasn’t overpriced? Or was it an attempt to use an emotional argument against the current administration?
I’m not saying if they were right or wrong, but I want to make decisions on facts and data and not “Elon = Nazi” and “orange man bad”.
Er. You must be new here I suppose. Obviously not been following the news ( Fox does not count).
Just to enlighten you the South African racist claimed to save millions by ending a VA outsourcing contract. Turns out that it was an email service administered by disabled veterans that cost very little and the contract was due to end anyway.
"has no one had an LTO tape go bad before? Or had one broken / mangled by a bad drive?"
I've had lots of things fail. I've had optical degrade to unreadability. I've had spinning disks fail without warning. I've had SSDs that were treated completely normally and started throwing SMART errors when they were really not that old. None of those prove that the technology is bad. DOGE claimed that tape was outdated simply because it is tape, which it isn't, and did not specify what they replaced it with. Maybe if they had an actual technical argument with details about why what they did made an improvement, it might convince us. Since they frequently claim credit for fixing things that weren't broken or where they didn't actually change anything, we tend not to assume that they have a good argument when the only statement they made is incorrect.
"And without details, why is “a service run by disabled vets” important?"
We don't know whether or not it was important. What we do know was that the money they claimed to have saved they didn't actually save, thus they were lying. The providers being disabled vets doesn't prove whether the service was good or not, and you can dismiss that as an emotional argument. However, it's an emotional argument that some agree with, which could be countered with information about why the service should be canceled, which DOGE chose not to do. You can't prove that the service was bad any more than someone opposed to its being cut can prove that it was good, meaning we're back to the one thing that is provable: the money that wasn't actually saved.
> The providers being disabled vets doesn't prove whether the service was good or not, and you can dismiss that as an emotional argument.
Well, it was a bit more than only an emotional argument, as the service was being provided to the Department of Veterans Affairs, the very people who are supposed to be supporting the veterans - one way of doing that being to support their businesses. Which businesses were still required to actually provide the service, as any other business would be.
"... but I want to make decisions on facts and data and not “Elon = Nazi” and “orange man bad”."
Somehow, this sounds comical.
It might have occurred to you to use a search engine and look up what actually happened?
Also, The Register (which you are reading here) has reported the whole saga.
Even better, I found that link on the bottom of the page I am writing this comment in.
Maybe, just maybe, you might try to look for "facts and data" before spending time to write a comment complaining about other people's opinions not being based on "facts and data". You might even get your answer in less time than it takes you to write the comment complaining about the lack of "facts and data".
"You think most search engines will give you unbiased lookup?"
Sorry, I had not considered the possibility that you have not yet learned how to process search engines output, my appologies. But I am wondering how you do get your information?
May I suggest the following sources of information to learn how to handle "news" and search engine results:
A textbook Journalism, 'Fake News' and Disinformation: A Handbook for Journalism Education and Training.
A list of short information guides, ie, How-To's:
- A quick guide to spotting misinformation Tips for fact-checking, staying informed and talking it out
- Spotting disinformation: Six tactics used to fool us Learn to spot the different tactics behind information manipulation, disinformation and fake news with these six videos
- Misinformation and Disinformation: Thinking Critically about Information Sources
- Facts and Fake News: How to tell the difference
- How to Spot ‘Fake’ News: Tips to Detect Disinformation, Misinformation and Biased Content
- Fake News/Misinformation/Disinformation : How can you identify Fake News?
- 10 Ways to Identify Disinformation – A Guide and Checklist
I agree. Stop behaving like dumb sheep following the herd because some left wing journalists who haven't actually got a clue encourage Musk hatred - that is all paid for, it's not honest. USAID was not there to help people, that was its cover. It was the CIA's ruse to increase funding and decrease oversight. All the funding for these corrupt or stupid practices is there because much of it comes full circle back to the pockets of corrupt officials and politicans. For journalists, they have families and mortgages and they know full well if they don't follow the media herd they wont have a job and because they are visible they will struggle to get another. The media herd is directed by nefarious self-interest by the likes of Soros, Gates, Blackrock and many others who gain power and wealth from YOU the people. "It's a club and we aint in it!" So wake up, look at the facts, validate what you are told, assess the sources and THINK FOR YOURSELF. If you don't you condemn all of us.
Sure, tapes can go bad like every other devices. That's why you don't have everything on a single tape. Handling hundreds if not thousands of supports incurs costs, of course. But a tape library with its controlled environment is far better than someone shffling DVDs around.
Those who dumped tape are those who have relatively small archiving needs, and don't need very long storage. Or those who switched to a cloud service that is using tapes anyway, and manages them for customers.
So…. ~30TB of tape vs a ~30GB disc alternative. Since most of us can do basic powers, you will realize you need ~1000 discs to fill that tape.
If we assume our worst case outcome, we have one long linear “tarchive” for a back up, now if I have two full back ups, am I more likely to have two dead tapes or more than two dead discs?
If we assume our best case outcome, I stick the tape in the drive, and if there’s some damage, it uses proper parity/EC and incremental math to fix the problem, or I use the second back up. With the discs, I am stuck swapping one every few minutes, and if one of them is damaged, we may have to go hunting for the parity data.
If we stretch that parity data out, I might wind up having to split my back up across two tapes whereas you would end up having to split that back up across 1100 discs if we had 10% more parity.
Incidentally, a disc mini loader that handles far less than 1100 or 2200 CD sized media units cost the same as a pair of singles or a dual-slot tape drive that can do the entire back up in one swing, requiring one change of tapes if we do a double back up (Which is the only way to do a backup).
Then, of course, everyone does a hash/crc check of their backup the next morning, right? Slap the tape in the drive let it check a handful of files and compare everything. Now, how the fuck do I do that with 1100 discs and get anything else done in my day?
The pint is for after I swap tapes.
Yes development aid getting to desperate people is a good thing. Maybe check where all the money goes, often not much gets to the right people. The 2 biggest (man-made) disasters right now are in Ukraine and Gaza. Why is the US only addressing one and the rest of the West addressing neither?
The war in Gaza is a perfect example of overpopulation.
TOo many people in a land that simpy cannot give. THe Israelis dont want to share, and the Palestinians in their wisdom have so many kids ... we all see the end result today.
Its also the same reason why nobody else wants the Palestinians. Jordan cant host 3 - 4M MORE people, they live in a fucking desert, with basically no water... Same for Egypt, 120M in a desert. THeir cities are filthy,...
Feel free to go live in Cairo, even the Great Giza Pyramids are surrounded by filth.
"have so many kids "
Eugenetics lead to horrific results. It is generally advocated by people who have no clue about demographics* nor genetics. And as far as I know, and experienced, they want to stay ignorant. Because eugenetics is just an excuse for demographic cleansing and genocide.
The plight of the Palestinians is the result of decades of oppression where two million humans have been locked up in what can only be described as a prison camp for over 50 years.
* Poor people get many children. The number of children per woman decreases fast when they get richer and a better education.
People have choice, they can have no kids, one. or ten.
Being an adult is about living with the consequences of their choices.
> The plight of the Palestinians is the result of decades of oppression where two million humans have been locked up in what can only be described as a prison camp for over 50 years.
Its two million today because they have too many kids. It has been OFFICIAL PLO policy to have lot sof kids so the Palestinians could outvote the non Pal in the Israeli democracy. Many PLO leaders have encouraged P famlies to have a lot of kids for this reason.
The entire story is sick, its sick and wrong to bring a large family into such an environment in the first place. People shouldnt be having 5 or 10 kids if they cant afford one.
The Israelis arent stupid they saw this happening so they locked them up.
Sometimes being this smart isnt a good strategy.
"People have choice, they can have no kids, one. or ten."
You are requiring oppressed people to live a celibate life for the benefit of their oppressors? And the decision to take kids is the most personal of decisions.
I have a strong feeling you demand from others what you are not willing to give yourself.
"It has been OFFICIAL PLO policy to have lot sof kids"
That is exactly the ideology of the ultra-orthodox Jewish community of Israel.
Again, extremists of all stripes think alike (they also both want to exterminate the other). In this case, the extremists in Israel and Palestinian areas have more in common than what divides them.
To maximise the savings: Normally you would use zip compression, backup the compressed tape, then erase the tape. Just change the order slightly: Erase the tap setting all to zero, zip compression and backup. Do the zip compression three times, and you whole library will fit on an SD-card.
And LED tell-tales, annunciator boards with lightbulbs behind them instead of the ubiquitous LCD panels of today, ACTUAL buttons that click and light up and electronics with proper plug in back planes rather than the entire system on a chip.
I'm getting all misty eyed...
Both of these were the height of technology when UFO was made. IIRC, the largest UK government data system in the late '60s was the DSS in Longbenton in Newcastle, and that was doing all of it's work with tape-to-tape batch runs. They didn't switch to disk processing until much later.
Although there were similar looking data tape drives, the ones shown on UFO were actually multi-track audio or video tape machines mounted vertically to make them look like computer tape drives.
But it was interesting to see that neither Moonbase nor SID had any tape drives visible anywhere.
It was also interesting to see that whenever a computer had anything to output, it was almost always printed on paper of some sort (ticker tape or cards, or sometimes continuious paper). This was some time before the general introduction of visual display units in real life, so the props. department wouldn't have known what to mimic. The best they came up with was radar-like CRTs, which were in use at the time with computers (Spacewar, anyone), but what is shown is obviously analogue.
Miss Eland's (Ed Straker's secretary at the film studio) keyboard also amuses me somewhat. It is such an impractical device for a typist that I wonder why they even tried.
Space 1999 was a little more realistic for the time, but not much. People could be seen toggling switches on wall mounted computers, rather than using keyboards, all over the place, something that was never going to happen in reality. There appeared to be one keyboard in the main mission, but that was mostly it.
I was intrigued by the way that Space 1999's Computer (most definitely singular) always printed its results out on till-roll paper, whilst SID's reports at least were printed on to full-width pages.
However:
> The best they came up with was radar-like CRTs
Both Moonbase Control and SHADO HQ had black & white monitors that displayed (changing) text, like a proper VDU.
I keep on having to explain it to younger people in IT & the cloud first mob.
Tape is immutable, cheap, essentially unhackable.
If you've got your backups on a tape on a shelf in your office or offsite...no Russian or Chinese hacker can do anything with them. You could lose your entire environment, disk backup, SAN, everything & if you've got your tape as belt & braces...you'll be fine.
Yes it's slow, yes it's a pain in the arse, but when the shit hits the fan you'll be glad you've got it
Some good points but not always true. You have to decide by use case which technology will work best. The amount of data people are keeping now makes tape awkward. Of course most of it is kept because "data is the new oil" or something. Bet it never gets used. A bit of good old data management would help but that costs.
Not all tape was that good.
Magnetic tape has a tendency to press through. In old audio tapes, you could often hear an pre-echo of what came later from this imprint. The same happened in digital tapes but that lead to data (read: tape) loss.
In the very old days, we had DEC TK50 tape cassettes. When someone inquired with DEC about the data guarantee we were told that the tapes had to be rewound after 6 months to prevent data loss. And that would then only last another 6 months before the data was gone. We were not pleased.
What has Musk done to anger journalists?
He was a founder of what became PayPal, he produced the first effective electric vehicles, he has improved and advanced rocketry and has the most effective heavy launch solution, he (mostly) removed government control and censorship from Twitter. He is now stripping wastage from corrupt and grift ridden US government. What's not to like? Are you all funded by Soros intent on imposing neo-feudalism on us? What's the deal?
Musk. A class or aromatic compounds generally used in perfumery. Substance with a particularly strong odour. Glandular secretions of various animals. From the Persian mushk meaning mouse, a euphemism for "testicle" which the gland of the musk deer resembled.
Something that smells.
> He was a founder of what became PayPal
No. Paypal existed first. It merged with Musk's x.com after Musk started a competing product. Musk - left.
> he produced the first effective electric vehicles
No. Even ignoring the *very* effective electric milk floats running around the UK from the 1930s to the present day (they are still around), and a few other small trader vehicles, Tesla already had an EV offering for the private individual before Musk bought into them. Talking of which, is Musk ever going pay back the money he took for the new Roadster? At what point does keeping that just become plain lld theft?
Rocketry? Yup, he has paid other people to make some good rockets. It has been good to see them complete the ideas that had been tested out in earlier decades.
Twitter? Not something l care about, but reading the press he hasn't improved it. And the source of the "censorship" - well, it had to be The Government, it couldn't have just been, oooh, good taste and common sense.
DOGE's hack'n'slash? Corruption and grift? Given the inaccuracy of the reports from DOGE it looks more like they are adding their own corrupting influences.
Soros? Why do you lot always go on about Soros? I'd've never heard his name if not for you lot. He isn't even very rich, anything he could buy, if he truly was, could be trivially countered by Musk.
By the way, you conveniently forgot about how Musk invented and has made an amazing success out of Hyperloop, how The Boring Company has created a high-speed conduit for cars beneath every major city (coating only one dollar per trip), how accurate and honest all his claims for forthcoming Tesla products have been, how his flamethrower has revolutionised the world of, um, what do you use a flamethrower for again?
Electric cars are over a 100 years old.
The outstanding problem back then and for a long time was the batteries. Tesla has always been buying batteries from other suppliers. It was innovations in battery that made it practical.
Trains have been electric for over a 100 years. The fuel many burn is to make electricity for the electric engine part. Trolly buses and trams themselves were electric, they use over head power lines.
In most operations disk/SSD makes a lot of sense. Clearly there will always be exceptions and specialist cases. In general the high bandwidths available have expanded the use cases for disk backup. Disk has constant error correction you know when it is developing problems or you should do at least. Tape sits around decaying unoticed unless you use it like disk. Tape has more stressful physical contact which ages it. Disk is easier to move to new technology because you don't need to move tapes around or have complex and more failure prone handling mechanisms. Disk is also multi-use not just for backups although if you have a lot of data it is probably economic to have specialised (tiered) systems. Data recovery is faster, you don't need to wait as much for the tape to load and the position to be located.
I am certain there are applications where tape makes sense / is cheaper. But disk has a lot of benefits especially if you have the bandwidth to move data over the wire to "offsite". Is it cheaper not always, each use case will vary.
"In most operations disk/SSD makes a lot of sense."
Just not for long term cold storage. Powered down disks/SSD have a tendency to get stuck/lose data over time. For decades of cold storage in imperfect environments, they are not advised.
And then there is the cost to consider.
I was going to post something about the costs of the change, transfer of the data to the new media and maintenance of the new backups, but frankly it was both nit-picking and pointless ands only indicates my complete inability to affect anything at all.
I'm going for some lunch and to 'drown my sorrows' as we (for the moment) say here in Blighty.
Happy Wednesday everybody!
Just today I opened a drawer in my parent's house and found a 8" stack of punch cards, compete with diagonal line drawn across the top. Printed line at the top of each has either a selection of numbers, or same interspersed with punctuation symbols. They almost certainly date from my dad's time at ICI in the 1960s, and would I'm sure be eminently readable now. As to what they actually *mean* I have absolutely no idea...
> DOGE recently posted on X to claim it had made progress in persuading the IT team at the US General Services Administration (GSA) to save "$1 million per year by converting 14,000 magnetic tapes (70-year-old technology for information storage) to permanent modern digital records."
Did no one reply on X to point out that Musk's cars run on "six thousand year old wheel technology"?
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
