[geocar]

LTO9 is like 45TB for <$100 (I got a bunch for €55 a piece), so 4.5TB for <$10 is being generous. And even if you didn't think they lasted 30-40 years and made copies every 3 years, it's still cheaper, not to mention you have fewer tapes to manage.

Also: I don't have a bd/dvd player in my house today, so even if there are the most tremendous gains in medical sciences I'm almost certainly not going to have one in 100+ years, so I'm not sure m disc even makes cost-sense for smaller volumes.

Maybe if you want to keep your data outside for sunshine like the author of the article, but that's not me...

[ghshephard]

In 20 years - what is more likely for you to be able to trivially go find on Ebay for < $50 - LTO Tape Reader - Random BD/DVD Player.

Likewise for 100 years, or 200 years. etc...

ALso - Archival media that needs re-copying every 20-30 years is not Archival media by my defintion

[Dylan16807]

LTO-9 tapes are actually 18TB, but yes they are a lot cheaper than optical discs. If you can afford the drive.

[derefr]

> so even if there are the most tremendous gains in medical sciences I'm almost certainly not going to have one in 100+ years

Never say never. People of today are building "90s entertainment center" setups for nostalgia, complete with VCRs. Given how many generations of game consoles had DVD drives (or BD drives that supported DVDs) in them, I would fully expect the "retro gaming" market of 100 years from now to be offering devices that can play a DVD.

[somat]

> Also: I don't have a bd/dvd player in my house today

You have just stumbled on the inherent problem with any archival media.

You really think you will have a working tape drive after 40 years?

Hell, in my experience tape drives are mechanically complex and full of super thin plastic wear surfaces. Do you really expect to have a working tape drive in 10 years?

As far as I can tell there is no good way to do long term static digital archives, And in the absence of that you have to depend on dynamic archives, transfer to new media every 5 years.

I think to have realistic long term static archives the best method is to only depend on the mark 1 eyeball. find your 100 best pictures, and print them out. identify important data and print it out. Stuff you want to leave to future generations, make sure it is in a form they can read.

[queenkjuul]

I do think LTO is a common enough format, and explicitly designed to be backwards-compatible, that it is very likely to be around in 10 years. The companies that rely on it wouldn't invest in it if they didn't think the hardware would be available. 40 years, harder to say, but as someone who owns a fair bit of working tape equipment (cassette, VHS, DV) that is almost all 25+ years old, i wouldn't think it'd be impossible.

That said, i imagine optical drives will be much the same.

[UltraSane]

For LTO tapes? Yes they will be available since the format is so common.

[nosuchthing]

LTO9 is only 18TB.

The LTO compression ratio is theoretical and most peoples data will be incompatible with native LTO compression method used.

[UltraSane]

3 years is way overkill. 10 years is more reasonable.