hold on i thought old fashion tape drives were in fact still very reliable and have insanely high capacity for data you don't need to access much or quickly?
this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2025
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Magnetic tape drives have the lowest per-terabyte cost of any digital storage medium and will typically function for 15-30 years
Well yeah but why would you store something in a facility you control on hardware you own when you could host it in the cloud?
Absolutely, they have proven long-term reliability, and great data density.
You would be correct
Chat is this real? Even my dumbass knows you don't get rid of the physical backups
Wow! A million dollars?! Now we'll be able to fire another...half of a Tomahawk missile 
What a coincidence, the price of a missile just went up by that exact amount
Just saved $800 by converting 4 rubber tires (137 yr old technology) to driving on my rims
Tapes are not only better for long term storage but it's just way cooler too
But you gotta pay a maintenance technician to store them, which is completely unreasonable to the kids that pirated all their software and are now running the government
I'm a kid who pirates all my software and I want archival tape...
Yeah, hate to have highly skilled professionals do important work.
Magnetic tapes are modern ‘permanent’ digital storage - they’re often used for long term archiving and backups. After decades of development and refinement it’s extremely reliable and relatively inexpensive. So I very much doubt that there will actually be long term savings. But we all know that’s not really the point of Doge so I guess who cares.
I was gonna say this, I've set up tape archiving system for companies in the past, they're very cheap, stable, and easy to maintain. They absolutely are the right, modern choice for a lot of long-term data archival use cases.
I'm guessing 'permanent modern digital record' means they uploaded it all into the cloud, where they will have to change it regularly due to updates, frequently lose access to it all after a datacentre outage, and soon get price gouged so they're paying far, far more.
good news guys, we stored all the government data on aws
Can't wait to see that s3 bucket in the next few months
It's going to be either billions or zero dollars
Converted all our files to Adobe suite format for accessibility and ease of use
Huh, weird I smell the library of Alexandria burning again
yea i imagine all of this information has been or will be shortly lost
Maybe this is just a way for them to hide shit by "accedentally" losing it
Ignorance when it comes to the internet is just miles and leagues worse than you can possibly imagine. I’m convinced that musk hasn’t thought about data retention for 20 years if not longer. “Permanent modern digital records?” There’s no fucking way
With a dash of Sunday scaries anxiety, below I channel my inner UlyssesT (may he rest in peace)
spoiler
Of course I would miss my precious hexagonal bear, but it would be a net good if a foreign actor dismantled the west’s flimsy network architecture in an unprecedented cyber attack and forced people outside once again. We’re all miserable whether we admit it or not (this is quite the take and I can defend it if someone feels strongly against it but I think people might know what I’m talking about) and have no company outside of emulating it in the most constrained and toxic digital pods which are a copy and paste of the environment depicted in the Matrix. If that wasn’t bad enough, we’re removing all likelihood of anything hinting at Socratic dialogue by firmly keeping people placated by their echo chambers, filled to the brim with numerous algorithmic systems tokenizing and manipulating our brain chemistry on the fly. We’re then wrapping all of this up in stolen data to train systems which require the same resources we need to survive.
This is a reality that would leave Vonnegut wishing he never would have existed
Throwing 200 years of archived data into s3 to ~~train LLMs~~ own the libs
I love how he has 0 understanding of things even tech laymen know.
The team of tape archivists at my office will be glad to hear that they can be replaced by a USB HDD.
You joke but there's a non insignificant chance some Management sees this and orders the same thing to be done
what
why would that make you save money
what
Keeping tape records in a warehouse is really cheap! That is the entire point of them. Also the fact that they are very reliable.
yea im confused where they got the number from, but they probably just pulled it out of their ass
You can store 50PB of tape data in a warehouse and service all the warehouse, labor, and equipment for $1M/year. Meanwhile you can store 5TB of data in an S3 bucket for a year for the same price.
they zipped it up and threw it on big balls' minecraft server
We migrated the tape backups to a Vercel app!
Did they put it on the blockchain
they uploaded it to google drive and then forgot the password
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Boys, I think I just accidentally deleted the entire "sell to government" google doc
70 years old? It must be inefficient. 
Government should just save $1B per year by converting 26 characters (1200 year old alphabet) to prmnnt mdrn txt spk.
Abolish Gregorian calendar (2025 year old calendar) to embrace Musk Calendar
*About 400 year-old calendar
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They've been switching from tapes to optical storage long before Elon. The money figure is made up, however.
optical? is that supposed to be more durable? last i knew cds and dvds had a pretty miserable shelf-life
Here's an article if you want to read more.
https://www.howtogeek.com/858426/whats-the-best-way-to-store-data-for-decades-or-centuries/
last i knew cds and dvds had a pretty miserable shelf-life
They last pretty long when not exposed to your car floor or living room shelves
unless you're stamping them, the chemical dyes used in dvd/cd-r/rw degrades fairly quickly iirc
I know Microsoft has been working on glass storage under their project silica moniker that they claim has stability measurable in the centuries and really high capacities but I don't know if it's deployed anywhere yet.
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he's probably stored it on NVME drives because he uses it in his gaming PC (that he definitely didnt get someone else to build)
I was gonna say something cute like how much are they spending to upgrade to save the money on maintenance but then I realized I don't actually care.
DOGE is pleased to announce that we have saved the tax payers 5 million dollars spent 20 years ago by converting the written constitution (6000 year old technology for information storage) to permanent modern TikToks.
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