This implies tape went away, which it didn't. Magnetic tape has always been the cheapest form of tertiary backup storage.

This is anything but a sneaky comeback. Tape storage has been the go to solution for large amounts of cheap archival storage for decades at this point. This tapes are produced by a variety of vendors and you’ll find tons of different archival systems powered by tape storage in essentially every datacenter

I’ve never had any problems keeping my scotch tape stored

Tape has the added benefit that the data is separate from the reader. If read/write heads fail in a hard drive, you’re looking at a costly clean room operation to transfer the platters into a new enclosure in order to salvage the data. If your tape reader fails, you can just plug in a new tape reader, pop your tape in and you’re good to go.

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." -Andrew S. Tanenbaum

The whole "offline" storage thing that tape offers is a huge plus to protect your data against e.g. ransomware

Tape never went away. It is good for backup but is not good if you are just wanting one piece of information off of it. They are to slow for anything but archival storage.

I’ve been in data storage since about 2000, and people have been predicting the death of tape as a backup media since then. I would always reply, the most bandwidth you will ever see is an Iron Mountain truck full of backup tapes going down the highway.

My dad works in IT. A sales rep gave him a refrigerator magnet of a tombstone named Tape Storage that died in 2009. I get a good chuckle out of that.

I actually always wanted to know in simple terms how storage devices worked, and was never quite sure until now. Thanks for that side lesson!

Here's an even more pressing question: Why is there stock footage of two scientists dancing around and tickling each others' heads?

The dancing clown was really useful for this one. You all should put it in more videos

It's interesting because Star Wars was made in the 70s they store info on "Data tapes". I always thought that was one aspect of that universe that seemed really dated but I guess they were right about that one

My hungry ass could never be trusted with tape based storage

One very important note, is that the original application of magnetic tape was to store analogue signals, so the re-proliferation can mainly be chalked up to someone realising that tape can also store vast quantities of digital data, and that it is unparalleled, if access speed is not at all a consideration.

How did he not mention flash storage even once?

I was just looking into robotic tape libraries recently. They are by far the largest data storage devices ever conceived of, supposedly reaching 2 exabytes (2 × 10¹⁸ bytes), enough to store over a quadrillion "standard pages" of uncompressed text, which is far more text than has ever been physically produced by humans. And it fits in a room. And it's automated. By the way, you missed an important detail about hard drives. Hard drives today don't just have a single platter like they used to. For instance, the WD 22 TB drive has ten platters of 2.2 TB each. So in a sense it's almost like buying ten drives, as most of the hardware can't be shared between platters. That's part of what contributes to its high cost (MSRP $600). The equivalent change for tape drives is making the tape thinner so more can be crammed in a single cassette. But just adding more length of tape to a cassette is far cheaper than adding additional platters to a hard drive.

Magnetic tape has been around this whole time. It's been the most common form of storage for infrequently accessed data, which typically means backups. It will never become a standard level storage because access time can be huge, but thanks to automated tape libraries being able to insert the right tape and read to the right thing, you can store data that you might need later much cheaper than storing it in a format where it stays available. If you look at a cloud service, something like Amazon S3 has their standard tier on actual drives (HDDs or SSDs), but their Glacier format is infrequent access, which is on tapes. Getting those files off the tapes starts with a request to make them live, which starts a process where AWS copies the data off those tapes onto something for you to get it later. It's a pretty common practice.

You forgot to mention the super cool way tape archives work. The have just few readers and many "offline" shelf and there is a super fast robot that swaps the right tapes into the reader It's amazing to watch

As a DBA and former Tape Library supervisor, this is fascinating. I've now seen IT come full circle, from punch cards to tape, HDD, SCSI, floppy, zip, SDD, cloud, and now back to physical tape. One reel we used to have had 750 MB of data on 5 lbs of tape.

Hard drive sales also began to tank a few years ago because of the rise of SSDs which aren't susceptible to the superparamagnetic limit because they use transistors instead of a magnetic media. The largest SSD currently available has a capacity of 100 terabyte, and they are significantly faster than traditional HDDs. (They have other problems, but ... that's another video for you! :D ) Tapes are an effecitive solution, but only really for offline storage - online data needs much faster access than tape can provide. Good video though!

Feel like I should point out that some interesting physics stuff (plasmonic near field transducers) have also made hard drives much more dense over the last couple years, but aren't quite commercialized yet. Seagate just started selling 30 TB drives, and the plan is to release 60+ TB drives in 2026. Doesn't even touch the 9 PB theoretical capacity of tape, but the upper limit hasn't *quite* been reached.

Data storage is becoming a combined arms system. From tape to HDD to SDD to NVMe. They all have their use and will work together to achieve maximum storage and optimize access and cost.

HAI, 5:17 - "You're spending too much money on coffee!" Me, who is spending zero money on coffee - "You have my attention."

That clown in the bottom of the screen 💀 1:39

Tape was an excellent backup storage. Once a tape was dropped, the data still intact

Tape storage is still a quite very common backup storage medium in I.T. Have worked in a few places where data backups would get backed up onto tape as a tertiary method of keeping the data, and the database could be restored from tape when/if needed. It's not uncommon at all for many companies to use this method to make sure that they always have a copy of the data somewhere incase it's ever needed.

We used tape for offsite backups since ... 20 years now... It's for cold storage basically

Very convenient that Technology Connections talked about how tape was the best way to store massive amounts of audio tracks before HDDs

Platter hard drives are continuing to evolve past the ~22 TB limit as well. Our good ole disk drives are starting to use a technology called "Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording" (HAMR). The first consumer HAMR drives are set to release either end of this year or early next year and will be around 30 TB, with up to 50+ TB planned for the future. Edit: A word :)

Magnetic tape has always been there but it was mostly for enterprise for backups. It's not great for instant retrieval but it can store a lot.

thanks for the clown editors, it was a really hard watch

0:19: Clarification - it is the oldest "non-volatile" storage. If we are talking about computer data storage as a whole, then Wiliams Tube did come a lot earlier, it was basically the very first RAM (volatile storage).

Also another advantage of tape storage is that the device holding the tape has no moving parts (at least the normal/traditional tape cassettes and stuff) which means there's nothing to break inside the cassette that holds the data unlike on hard drives where if the mechanism that read and writes the data fails, you have to spend A LOT of money on getting the data recovered by some specialist. Also hard drives are very sensitive to physical damage, and pretty any movement while running.

The editor and animator nailed this video - very fluid and punchy. 👌

Tape drives will evolve into Linear Pile systems, probably by the end of the decade with crazy multiple read/write heads. First version will literally be stacked (Pile) but circular versions will be on the scene soon after. The best ones will be kept in orbit with some serious shielding. What's old is new again but better 😉

Tape does have two big limitations: 1) Unlike Hard Drives, tapes are a contact media so they wear and the process can also weaken/corrupt the stored information 2) Tape is rolled up so one layer of information (magnets) has another layer of information (magnets) above it and below it which can also weaken/corrupt the stored information over time (called plate-through).

I'd love to have some kind of tape backup, but all tape systems are mad expensive! Some startup should have a cheap tape backup using audio cassettes and USB.

3:26 that is the most disturbing clip of stock footage I have ever seen

LTO/SAIT2 tape has been standard for the last 2 decades, now optical archival like M-Disc on the consumer side and Sony Optical Archive is replacing it due to long term cost of duplication and risk of loss in a flooding or thermal event being smaller and endurance goes from 30 years to 100+ years.

there is a subplot to this which involves the weird standards of LTO tape storage systems and the fact they have extremely limited backwards compatibility. So while you can theoretically store them for a long time, they have a huge planned obsolescence problem and after 10+ years most facilities wont have the hardware necessary to read older tapes anymore, and you need to copy the entire archive over to the newer standard.

It would actually be pretty useful if you could load the tape into a tower like a cassette, which would load into memory similar to an ssd, or traditional hdd, so that could be pretty convenient if it was fast enough, as you could in theory just swap it out similar to how we used to use floppy disks.

Very interesting that magnetic tape is still used for data back-up, acually makes a lot of sense for cost alone, plus being able to move media and its stored data to an off-site location in case something happens to your data centre. On a personal note, you've made me go and look at my old video and audio casette collections now!

The key term here is "infrequent". Companies are rarely doing research via loading tapes because they're massive, slow to read, and require human intervention (generally). Companies (again generally) are storing information that's valuable, either dollar-wise or strategy-wise, but can't be acted upon, _OR_ because they're contractually/legally bound to store it for a long period. Tapes are selling more than mechanical hard drives, but not for the same purposes.

brb gonna buy a 9000TB tape storage drive to replace my old HDD on my laptop

General public getting to know that tech like this is still getting used is funny xD Yup, in datacenters, it's still great for high high density storage where you don't need to read often. Perfect for a long term backup! Also, cool video! Love the fact you explain in much more detail about the technical stuff!

Fun Fact - CERN (Large Hadron Collider people, a little thing called the World Wide Web, and many others) still use tapes to store data. The reason is simple - tapes are much cheaper than magnetic disks, they contain several TB of data on one cassette, they last a very long time and, most importantly, they can read real data from tapes from 30-50 years ago thanks to the simplicity of this technology.

I find it funny how humanity constantly alternates from discs to tape

the zoomer retention clown has me losing it

2:35 where do you even find this stock footage lmao

When my best friend and I were about 9 or 10 and my little brother was about 6 or 7, in the earlier 90's, we realized the boom box I got for Christmas has a mic built in. It was a few little holes in an indentation on the front of the stereo. We didn't know why, so we put a blank tape into the 2nd cassette deck, the one that records, and pushed play/record and started talking into the mic. Sure enough, it recorded our voices onto tape. We thought it was the greatest thing. We created a radio show, complete with scripts and interviews with friends. Songs were added into it all. And we had whole cassettes full of our "radio shows". Years later when I was around 18 or 19, I was digging around the shed going through old boxes of stuff from when me and my brother were kids and found the tapes. Our family had moved years ago and I had lost touch with all my old friends long ago. I put one in and it brought back so many memories. Hearing my friends voices. Hearing my own and my brother's from years back. I had completely forgot about the tapes years back, but suddenly I could remember writing the scripts and brainstorming ideas for the show I'm listening to. I spent all day listening to those tapes. I still have them at my moms house, and they still play and sound good. I'm 41 years old now and those tapes are the best pieces of my past I probably have. I thought about even burning them to CD's. Maybe one day I will.

I love the editing on this one. Super fun.

Tape has never gone anywhere, every company I have worked at for the last 25 years have used tape, because it's cheap and efficient. I even run LTO-5 tapes at home for backups in my homelab.

Clown was pretty entertaining ngl

To store more data on tape, you need either longer tape (bigger reels/lower storage density in the machine) or thinner tape (weaker/print thru/self erasure) or smaller "bits" (higher error rates). And that needs to work in a "dirty" environment. It has a 10 year "shelf life" (no use), or x number of passes (depending on tape and drive). Tape has always had its place as an offline/offsite backup. It **should** be safe from ransomware, fire/disaster, etc. BUT it becomes susceptible to theft and loss (ibm lost customer data when tapes fell out of the back of a truck).

I used to work for NOAA years ago. We archived our weather and climate data on LTO6 tapes. Each tape held 2.5 TB. We would load them into the tape machine on trays with 10 tapes apiece meaning 25 TB at a time. The machine itself held 30 trays which means 300 tapes or 750 TB. A little robot inside the tape backup machine would prepare tapes to be loaded onto a shelf outside of the machine that held hundreds of other tapes and one of my jobs was to periodically feed the machine expired tapes that it could write over and take out tapes that our archive system said should be stored on the shelf or driven over to our off-site location.

The question I have is, what about rewriting data? If you store something on a rotating disc, the magnetic poles can be rewritten by reversing the flow. Older magnetic tape technology was not good for rewriting anything that needed to be changed later. This is a more permanent solution if you are not going to change the data, but people update their files All the time. Before this becomes consumer standard, that is a hurdle that will need to be jumped over.

Except tape storage never really went away.

A disadvantage I read about tape backup though is that each time the read head rubs against the tape to read/write/erase data, friction between the two wears out the tape, so after ~45x backups the tape is so worn that it might lead to data on it being unreadable & thus corrupted

"but it's interesting because the different box is old" really got me 😂

Nah, glue stick storage is the future.

ayo? half as intresting has all his vids on tape?

More videos like this please. Although tape storage for backups never went out od style.

The visuals and editing in this one were *chef's kiss*

I am data hoarder and this is true! Everyone is talking about Tape Storage

Still probably faster than that HDD that I have in my PC since 1774

LOL the editing and script are absolutely hilarious. Kudos.

I worked at a Data Centre and yes, some companies actually had those boxes with tapes (it’s like a glass cube where you can select a tape and the machine would take it). Fun fact: once a client asked if we had a magnetic room for storing those tapes; we didn’t (Tier 3 only) but it would be interesting to see one.

LTO tapes have been around for a while and are used for archival. This isn't anything new.

Honestly I love tape storage it's really cool (even if I don't use it myself because while the tapes may be cheap the read/write machines certainly aren't). It'll also likely be incredibly useful for connectomics (since connectomics deals with massive datasets).

FWIW, I recently 'got into' tape to fulfill the 'backups shouldn't be on the same type of media' issue. It's still amazingly expensive for what it is, but I found a 'sweet spot' with LTO4, where if you're crafty you can find drives with HBA and cable for around $100-$150. It's only 800GB in capacity per cartridge, and it doesn't benefit from the LTFS option available on LTO5 and beyond, but for my home lab purposes it works well enough. Feels VERY retro using tape, last time I used it was in the early '00s at my workplace. And using 'tar' for what it was originally designed for is kinda neat!

The B-Roll for this video is hilarious. Good job editor/producer.

1:22 its nice of you to tell editors to put a clown to keep us entertained. Either editors are held hostage or you pay them 6 figures

I really enjoyed the dancing clown! Can he make a comeback on future videos??

Ah, the joys of tape. I started on IBM S/370 mainframes. With 3420 "round reel" tapes. Back then, many files were designed to be read sequentially. So your master account file would be on a set of tapes (yes, multiple tapes). The "keypunch" people would put update information on an 80 column physical card. We'd run a "batch job" which would read the tape and card (both sorted in the same order). When the "key" one the tape record matched the one on the card, the in storage record would be updated. The tape record, updated or not, would then be written onto another, output, tape. Of course the card input could indicate to create a new record or delete an old one. A deletion simply meant don't written the in storage to the new output tape. You haven't known fear like having a tape break. Well, maybe you have when you accidentally deleted a file and emptied the trash can in Windows. But the fun was the fact that the tape drives were stupid. If the tape broke, the tape motor would continue on, taking all the tape off the reel.

Your producer dancing on the screen was quite helpful.

This *AMZT66* needs to be claimed. I know it's strange and not expected at this channel but you can understand this within minutes and then you also know why all the likes go towards it

1:44, no I don't got it, there was a frickin clown in the corner distracting me!!!

The reason there are 7 or 9 tracks for 6 or 8 bits is because they'll have an extra parity bit for basic error correction.

2:36 Dancing genetic technicians is the best stock footage I've ever seen

Today's Fact: In 2020, researchers used quantum entanglement to teleport information between two chips in a silicon-based system, a major step forward for quantum computing.

Out of context but pierce brosnan is so handsome

Interesting to see magnetic tape making a comeback! I was a 90s kid-teen so I primarily used 5.25 & 3.5" floppy disks and hard drive on my PC back then so I missed the data tape era.

don't know about those wide tapes , but the home computers of 80s actually did not record straight 0s and 1 onto tape, but used modulation/demodulation like dial up modems, and there was frequency modulation, not sure about amplitude modulation, and phase modulation also. some systems had information written in blocks and a checksum would follow, and duplicate blocks in case of any damage/ deterioration of part of a tape...

Love the 🤡, we need more Cameo of him in future episode.

They used to use cassettes to store data in the 1980s and you’d plug a normal cassette player into your computer and play the audio which was then translated into information

Love the "Magnets...... 2!" bit at 3:29

"That different box is old." Such refreshing honesty.

2:36 Now that looks like a fun photo shoot 😎. Sad, every time I wore a bunny suit was in a boring, stale clean room, I wish I got to take mine out for fun dance scenes like this back in undergrad.

There is something your are over looking. Even if we're miles away from the "theoretical limit" you are forgetting how fast tapes degrade. In 2014, I participated in a research project to recover data from old 9 track tapes. These tapes had been in storage since 85 or 90 when they got a new cartridge system to do their backups. Somebody else was restoring the data from the cartridges. He confided in me that while I was recovering about 90% of the data on the 9 track tapes, he was only able to recover 30-35% of the cartridge tapes - making them not worth the effort. The reason why the 9 track tapes held up was because the magnetic surface as well as the backing was thicker. So there was less flaking, or really less effect from flaking. Also there was less print-thru. Modern data tapes are great for short term storage but in the long term, they are not.

In 2005 I was working in a doctors office which had an in-house server running the practice management software and the server backup was done on tape. I forget exactly how much data each tape held but it was in the tens of GBs. The use case never went away for tape storage it just didn't get that personal consumer angle investment and apparently won't be which isn't surprising.

From what I know tape isn't really used for data that could be accessed at any time, like google docs (though tape could explain why the version history of google docs sometimes takes minutes to be displayed), but mainly for backup.

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a UPS truck full of tapes.

Imagine making Ultra HD Camcorders using Magnetic Tape Cartridges? It would feel like loading a film cartridge into a movie camera! Yeah bring it on.

Tape storage never went away. It never stopped being used for long term storage. My University uses it to archive records and to take their nightly backups, for example.

One of your best videos ever

As a European $7 for a coffee seems kinda very expensive (around 2.5€ here in Belgium and for a very good quality, but yeah I have seen some company using 30Tb tape storage for archive which they send to a bank for off-site storage backup weekly.

I love that this channel really does live up to it's name

im hoping that some day i can get my hands on a tape drive . it sounds super neat and useful for all the files i barely use

Tape could be used for long term storge but is occasionally scanned and put into hardrives for it to be more easily accessed