180TB on a cassette tape?

A 180TB storage device? Nice.

On a cassette tape? rolleyes

http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/08/tech/innovation/data-storage-cassette-tape-sony/

I'm having flashbacks to the Apple II I used in high school and the tape backup unit on my second PC in the early '90s that took hours to back up one gigabyte. uke

 

Great- it would only take 10 years ( at one a day) to watch the first cartridge.:-D

 

I want to know what RESTORE times are. I could care less about backup times - those are scheduled, usually man-less hours - overnight, over weekends. The RESTORES are the catastrophes when users are stomping up and down admin necks and offices.

 

We finished our shift away from tapes when SATA and 1Tb drives became universal. And short of drop-kicking those out of 10-storey windows into lava pits, those HDDs have been easier to handle and hardly ever get caught up in a sticky tape pinchroller.

And RESTORES can be so easily done and pre-validated so that process is almost certainly correct before it begins. That's handy when doing IMAGE RESTORES on 1 particular user out of 2,318. "You put WHOSE image onto HIS?!!"

I think my only complaint about archival HDD processings is that they have become so easy, so ubiquitous, that they are taken for granted and Most Careful Attention is not always meted out by the operators. We find more mis-labeled drives in a set than we did with mis-labeled tape-sets. But even then, the error detection is so much quicker, and fixing it (relabel the fourth drive as the correct #3) is that much quicker, too.