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Re:One Million Passports Leaked Online by annzabelle on Monday June 29, 2026 @06:21PM (#48726104)
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.
Re:One Million Passports Leaked Online by DANmode on Monday June 29, 2026 @06:32PM (#48726207)
Does tape still burn really easily?

Or has that been fixed?

Re:One Million Passports Leaked Online by Terr_ on Monday June 29, 2026 @06:40PM (#48726287)
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.

Re:One Million Passports Leaked Online by rcbdev on Tuesday June 30, 2026 @02:11AM (#48729061)
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.

Re:One Million Passports Leaked Online by Tangurena2 on Tuesday June 30, 2026 @08:51AM (#48732028)
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.