DOGE Replacing Gov Tape Archives With Digital - Bad?

[Ben]

While political, the discussion is technical. I must be missing something here. While digital as in "cloud" can be argued to be bad, as far as physical media storage, I don't understand how tape is better for long term archival storage than any digital hardware, like SSD drives, or even hard drives for that matter. I grew up in the era of cassette tapes for music and for loading my chess game onto my Timex Sinclair. I dealt with tape backups at work.

Tape sucks. Everybody was happy when we started doing stuff like mirrored drives and HD backups at work, and for my home computer for that matter. If there is some real concern about longevity and survivability (EMP maybe?), it seems like even DVDs are better archival storage than tape. I dunno - maybe this IS political, and liberal Gizmodo is just doing a "But Elon".

https://gizmodo.com/doge-replacing-magnetic-tape-archives-with-digital-is-a-dangerous-move-critics-say-2000586634

[zahc]

Tape is still the cheapest mass storage medium, and it's also the most stable. There is no replacement as far as I know. Large magazines of LTO with auto changing is synonymous with archiving. The alternatives are still basically spinning rust (hdds), which perpetually consume power and require active management, or flash memory, which is similar, and neither is cheaper.
Nobody knows how long modern flash really retains data and there is no way to know but wait and see. Tape is the only medium with an a known archival lifetime, besides things like microfiche. Throughout the decades there was thought that CD, then DVD, then Blu-ray would take over archiving, but the data rate isn't very good, physical density was outpaced by other media, and stability turned out to be overrated. I've opened brand new blank discs that were already exhibiting disc rot in the retail package.

Redbox kiosks are actually modified commercial tape archive machines, just adapted to be dvd kiosks.

[Perd Hapley]

THARE GUNNA PUT IT ALL ON SIGNAL FOR PUTIN!! FREE PALISTINE !!

[Brad Johnson]

I've seen nothing on what type of tape storage they're discussing. If it's legacy tape, like reels, then yeah, converting to more modern storage media is a good thing. Legacy media takes up a crap ton of storage room, is relatively fragile compared to today's tape-based solutions, and most is getting old enough to suffer serious age-related degradation. If it's modern tape, maybe. Depends on what it is and when it's from.

There's also the possibility of misusing terminology. Their "converting to digital" may simply be converting legacy media to modern digital storage with tape backup, extremely common in enterprise-level archiving. Could be TDS-afflicted talking heads bastardizing the facts, or just a reporter with no tech savvy.

I've seen nothing about technical aspects of the conversion, only the hand-wringing. Anyone have info in this respect?

Brad

[Bogie]

I'm over here wondering about the cost per gig, and does anyone else still use that media?
 
Seriously, I'm guessing that the costs may be getting up there for back ups, much less new stuff getting stored.
 
We know that the .gov still uses some 8" floppies... Which means that Nashua or 3m or someone is likely getting subsidized to produce them...

[MillCreek]

I saw a story on the NBC network news the other day about DOGE advocating for digitalization of the Federal OPM retirement paperwork.  There are miles and miles of file cabinets in an Iron Mountain limestone mine in Pennsylvania all containing Federal employee paperwork managed by hand.  I had heard about this years ago and if I recall correctly, Congress would not appropriate money to digitize the records and create an electronic system going forward.

[K Frame]

The life of a tape archive is only as long as there are devices that can read and recover the data on the tape.

Millions of feet of tape containing data from multiple NASA missions were kept because that information would be valuable to researchers and historians for decades.

Much of it is now unreadable and unrecoverable because apparently no one thought about the physical infrastructure needed to read the data on those tapes. In many cases the proprietary machinery that was designed and constructed just for NASA was scrapped with no consideration to the archiving issue.

There have been limited attempts to recover some of the data by hand building readers, but its been hit and miss.

[MechAg94]

I saw a story on the NBC network news the other day about DOGE advocating for digitalization of the Federal OPM retirement paperwork.  There are miles and miles of file cabinets in an Iron Mountain limestone mine in Pennsylvania all containing Federal employee paperwork managed by hand.  I had heard about this years ago and if I recall correctly, Congress would not appropriate money to digitize the records and create an electronic system going forward.

How many of those archives actually need to be retained at all? 

[Ben]

To me, the whole tape archive thing is more of a, "This is how we've been doing it" combined with, "there are too many hoops to jump through to change it."

I worked a few missions with USCG in the C-130s with the CASPER system. I don't know if they've finally changed it, but circa 2012, the bleeding edge high resolution surveillance sensors recorded to VHS tape. All because, "Well, that's how the system was designed". Nevermind that you were negating all the sensor upgrades that plugged into the pallet by continuing to record on VHS.

[Brad Johnson]

To me, the whole tape archive thing is more of a, "This is how we've been doing it" combined with, "there are too many hoops to jump through to change it."

I worked a few missions with USCG in the C-130s with the CASPER system. I don't know if they've finally changed it, but circa 2012, the bleeding edge high resolution surveillance sensors recorded to VHS tape. All because, "Well, that's how the system was designed". Nevermind that you were negating all the sensor upgrades that plugged into the pallet by continuing to record on VHS.

Was it actual analog VHS format, or was it s system which stored digital video data using VHS tapes? If memory serves, a company called Corbus (or Corvus?) had a digital storage solution which used VHS tapes.

Brad