“The Department of Government Efficiency, Musk’s vehicle. made news by “discovering” the General Services Administration uses tapes, and plans to save $1M by switching to something else (disks, or cloud-based storage).”
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Keep in mind that tapes are still the most efficient storage medium, in terms of both cost and physical space used. What they lack is speed. These characteristics make them the perfect medium for archiving and backup.
To add: there’s no way money can be saved by switching to another medium. Switching to HDDs, SSDs, etc will be many times more expensive, and switching to cloud would be much more expensive over the long run. It’s unclear whether he wants to move existing data to other mediums (very expensive and stupid - the tapes are already there and have almost no upkeep) or just new data (slightly less stupid).
slightly less stupid
Which is why that’s definitely not what’s going to happen…
The ultimate defense against hacking is low tech storage. Tape is stable. As long as you keep magnets away from it.
Not even Elons Incels could get at that data.
Tape is also difficult to steal. The machines to read the tapes are expensive and uncommon, a tape reading machine requires no internet connection, meaning it can’t be subject to man-in-the-middle attacks, and the physical storage devices can be secured and guarded when not in use.
This fucking idiot is gonna lose the plans for our nukes, isn’t he. Just like when he disabled half of twitter because he physically yanked a server rack out of the building without knowing what it did.
It’s not even that it’s low-tech. Tape is high-tech, it’s been updated over the years. LTO10s are targeting 36TB of data per tape.
It’s the pig-ignorant newbies thinking “hurr durr tapes are 1970s tech”. Hard drives are also 1970s tech.
They have their advantages and disadvantages, is all. They’re not well suited for situations where you can’t guarantee a clean room (or enclosed tape reader), for instance, since the tape medium is exposed to the air. Dust can mess it up REAL good.
But for some situations, it’s indispensable.
