Maybe it could be used to train a neutral network. Maybe it contains dirt on a teenager, who might become a politician two decades from now. Maybe it contains an otherwise lost historical event.
LTO is enterprise gear that is not suitable for people. If you want to waste alot of time with backups, curate your stuff and get it on optical media. Better yet, print the good stuff on archival papers and ink and stow them securely.
This has little to do with whether you curate. That's a whole different discussion about optimizing for cost, where many many terabytes eventually make LTO become cheaper. When we're specifically looking at reliability for important files, there might only be one tape's worth of data. It's a $3000 fee to make that tape (and its backups) last a long time in storage, and having more or less data barely affects the price.
LTO9 is like 45TB for <$100 (I got a bunch for €55 a piece), so 4.5TB for <$10 is being generous. And even if you didn't think they lasted 30-40 years and made copies every 3 years, it's still cheaper, not to mention you have fewer tapes to manage.
Also: I don't have a bd/dvd player in my house today, so even if there are the most tremendous gains in medical sciences I'm almost certainly not going to have one in 100+ years, so I'm not sure m disc even makes cost-sense for smaller volumes.
Maybe if you want to keep your data outside for sunshine like the author of the article, but that's not me...
> Also: I don't have a bd/dvd player in my house today
You have just stumbled on the inherent problem with any archival media.
You really think you will have a working tape drive after 40 years?
Hell, in my experience tape drives are mechanically complex and full of super thin plastic wear surfaces. Do you really expect to have a working tape drive in 10 years?
As far as I can tell there is no good way to do long term static digital archives, And in the absence of that you have to depend on dynamic archives, transfer to new media every 5 years.
I think to have realistic long term static archives the best method is to only depend on the mark 1 eyeball. find your 100 best pictures, and print them out. identify important data and print it out. Stuff you want to leave to future generations, make sure it is in a form they can read.
I do think LTO is a common enough format, and explicitly designed to be backwards-compatible, that it is very likely to be around in 10 years. The companies that rely on it wouldn't invest in it if they didn't think the hardware would be available. 40 years, harder to say, but as someone who owns a fair bit of working tape equipment (cassette, VHS, DV) that is almost all 25+ years old, i wouldn't think it'd be impossible.
That said, i imagine optical drives will be much the same.
It is only backwards compatible two generations, occasionally something slips at the LTO trust (or wherever those things are designed) and you get three generations. But if I have a basement full of LTO1 tapes no currently manufactured drive will read them. I would have to buy a used drive and the drives were never really made all that well. Better than the DAT drives one company I worked for used for some of their backups. But still mechanically very complex with many many small delicate plastic parts that wear out quickly. Those DAT drives were super delicate and also suffered from the same generational problems LTO does. We had a bunch of DAT1 tapes somebody wanted data from but had no working drives to do so. All our working drives were newer DAT3 and 4
That was always the hard part to justifying tape backup. the storage is cheap. but the drives are very expensive. And never seemed to last as long as their price would warrant.
It would be neat if someone resurrected Iomega and launched the 2026 version of the Zip drive for local backup. It'd be something like $200 (same as the original Zip drive) and it would take 20TB WORM tapes that cost $20 each. There would be some kind of horrible limitation, like it would take 2 months 24/7 to actually write 20TB, but it would come with simple software that rapaciously grabbed your whole cloud life and local data, and the tapes would last forever.
I just looked, and iomega.com seems to be some kind of malware site. Sad.
LTO drives are expensive but they are very well designed and it is the most reliable portable storage format available. Full LTO tapes in a good fire rated safe really provide a fantastic sense of security. The cost of the drive is amortized over the total bytes you store.
Assuming you need to “get up and go”, like a refugee situation, what are the chances that you’ll find a drive that can read Blu-ray disks, versus the chances that you’ll find a LTO tape drive ?
Blu-ray drives are fast becoming hard to find, so I'd pack a USB bluray drive with your discs.
New computers don't have them and haven't for a few years. I purchased a drive recently and to get a quality drive, I had to go for a NOS pioneer drive, or get another LG, and the LG drives are kid-of shit.
The way houses are built and what materials are used is very location specific do to climate and economics. North America has oodles of land to grow wood on. When you have cheap nails and screws wood is a FANTASTIC material to make houses out of and not flimsy at all when designed correctly. Europe used to make houses out of wood until they cut down all of their forests. Wood and drywall construction has the advantage of being fast to build and easy to remodel.
I personally like houses that use Insulated Concrete Forms for the exterior walls.
Everyone at Tesla probably thinks they should use LiDAR but Musk doesn't want to so they don't. Just like so many people must have told Musk using stainless steel for the body of the cybertruck was a terrible idea and he did it anyway. Musk is deep in the "only talks with yes men" phase of being a billionaire.
Human eyes and vision system are so much better than current cameras and GPUs they aren't really comparable.
Also we should be aiming at creating autonomous driving systems that are SAFER than humans and this requires as many sensor modalities as possible. Vision + LIDAR + Radar + Sonar + terahertz Radar.
It is far, far, far, far more likely that this sort of mass surveillance capability will be used for bad purposes (even by law enforcement) than it will be used to find an escaped child murderer. (Hell, I am convinced that this sort of thing is already more frequently used for bad purposes than good.)
Also like, how many escaped child murderers are there per year in the US? Like... one? I don't think that's worth pervasive mass surveillance, though I would understand how a parent whose kid had been abducted might believe it would be.
Doesn't have to be. Here in the Netherlands it's actually illegal to (permanently) film public space, and people can and will point that out to any offenders.
They are everywhere. Knowing the old “Germany is the land of privacy” I was shocked to walk about in many neighborhoods, from pretty run down to affluent, and see Ring, Nest, Arlo, all cloud connected cameras hanging over doors but turned more towards the public road in front of the house.
There's permanent cameras pointed at the street in the red light district in Amsterdam, along with warning signs saying that photographing the women in the windows is illegal.
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