datahoarder
Who are we?
We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.
-- 5-4-3-2-1-bang from this thread
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Don't buy into tape. It is costly and is inferior to hard drives by most metrics for smaller scale operations. You can easily get 8TB hard drives for less than $20/TB. While tape is cheaper than that, the drive to actually use it is expensive, plus you get all the disadvantages of the tape itself.
Fun fact: you can probably buy a whole server, external sas card and disk shelf for less than the cost of a somewhat modern tape drive.
If you are wanting to store less than 100TB of data, it would probably be cheaper to use drives, then in 3-5 years buy another set of disks and still be ahead compared to tape.
Yeah that's what it seems like, used SAS HDD are around $7/TB right now and I don't think anything is going to be cheaper than that.
Yeah but what about in 9000 years?