Back to the Future - Magnetic Tape

Hello, everyone.

I've been thinking lately because I have a massive collection of images from my museum archives that don't get accessed very often, and buying more disks is getting expensive and seems a bit unreliable. I'm wondering if it might actually make sense to pick up a tape drive and move everything over to magnetic tape.

Is this even still a thing in practice? Does anyone have any info on whether I can even find a drive and some magnetic tape locally here in the States, or what the read/write speeds and capacities are like these days. I'm pretty much starting from scratch here, so I could use a little guidance.

Everything I find online feels pretty outdated.

Thanks.

I suspect that technology is just too outdated to be cost-effective anymore. Hard drives are actually quite inexpensive and reliable—or at least more dependable than magnetic tape. Especially if you aren't trying to play yo-yo with your data 😬
It seems like people don't really use it much anymore :/ I'm not sure about all the other details.

Michael Anderson10 said:Is it actually worth getting a tape drive and backing everything up to magnetic tape?

A DDS6 DAT drive—roughly $1667 (internal or USB)
A pack of tapes, 5x80 GB—around $333

It's nowhere near being cost-effective—honestly, for that kind of money, you can get way more storage using other media. Plus, you have to baby magnetic tape just as much as you would optical discs.
Your write speeds are going to be stuck at maybe 20 GB/h if you go the USB route—now, the SCSI, SAS, or fiber channel drives are about 5-6x faster, but they’ll also cost you a fortune.

Michael Anderson10 said:Does anyone even use this stuff anymore?

They’re used for archiving massive amounts of data—the price per GB drops the more data you throw at it—but those kinds of enterprise systems are incredibly expensive and totally overkill (not to mention a waste of money) for home use.