Much like that old quip about the bandwidth of a vehicle full of tapes: "Never underestimate the at-rest security of a room full of filing cabinets."

Friction and delay have always been aspects of security.

Not sure if they're still doing this, but as of a few years ago, the IRS was still using literal trucks full of tapes to transport data to backup facilities. Tapes are good for this because they don't degrade as quickly as hard drives, so if you're actually looking to do archival storage that will outlast the cloud provider of the decade, they are surprisingly practical.

Does tape still burn really easily?

Or has that been fixed?

Compared to what what option, clay tablets of cuneiform? :p

In terms of significant danger, perhaps you're thinking of nitrocellulose movie film that was phased out in the '50s.

Working with tape storage was part of my high school education. So was mainframe job scheduling...

Europe is as much ahead as it is behind.

As long as the janitors aren't using electric floor buffers, like NASA used to do, the tapes will last forever. However NASA ended up losing the data (from 1960s space missions) on the bottom 2 rows of tapes. It took a couple decades though.

Example of those mag tapes: https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/memory-storage/8/...

How they were stored: https://www.hewlettpackardhistory.com/item/an-attractive-sol...

The newer stuff is a heck of a lot better than the olden stuff.

It depends on the stakes?

In the 90s, the French IRS seized massive amounts of files from Elf, then a major French oil company under investigation for various frauds.

Their offices where burglarized maybe a couple nights after that. All that was seized disappeared.

Nothing says “we’re watching you” like the wifi password at the hotel I stayed at in Shanghai being my passport number.