Garbage Collection #006 - LTO-8 and the Future of Tape

This week LTO-8 was announced, with raw cartridge capacities of up to 12.8TB. In this podcast, recorded on 23rd October 2017, Chris and Martin discuss the evolution of LTO from a lowly 100GB to todays media with 120x the capacity.

Tape is changing and becoming more of an archive medium, as backup has increasingly moved to disk. This begs the question, should standard formats like LTFS be more common? How should media be recycled and what other ways are there for getting data onto tape media?

For a bit of nostalgia, there’s mention of the Microdrive from Sinclair and the once ubiquitous Jazz and ZIP drives.

Don’t forget to rate us on iTunes, it only takes a moment!

Elapsed Time: 00:27:46

Timeline

00:00:00 – Introductions
00:01:10 – LTO-8 is released – LTO speeds and feeds (link)
00:04:00 – Positioning against the competition – 3592 and T10000, LTO competes
00:06:40 – The changing position of tape
00:08:00 – Backup has changed to re-provisioning, with restore only for the data
00:10:10 – What happened to LTFS? Still used to ship content around (link)
00:11:45 – Spectra Logic Black Pearl – a gateway to getting data onto tape (link)
00:13:20 – Tape as the perfect medium for archive
00:15:00 – LTO-8-M 50% extra capacity (link)
00:17:00 – Jaz and ZIP Drives! (link)
00:18:10 – The ZX Spectrum Microdrive (link)
00:20:30 – Archive and compliance for tape
00:22:50 – Refresh and maintaining an archive
00:24:30 – The hundred year archive
00:25:00 – The effect of GDPR on archiving and data deletion with tape