There is no such thing as safe data storage. Storage must be on multiple devices in multiple locations.
I have asked a person who deals with reading thousands of 'old' tapes. My question was what failure rate would you expect on 1,000 10 year old LTOs. The answer was about 10, but typically more than zero and less than 20. I would expect a much higher failure rate from disk drives that had been on the shelf for 10 years.
The answer for DAT tapes of the same age though is much worse.
One nice thing with a tape failure is that it not normally 100%. A non spinning disk gives you nothing, a tape that fails at 80% capacity can give quite a load of info.
Tapes are also immune to being changed once written. Thus a file on a tape cannot be changed, which forensically is a very powerful feature.
Tapes and disks both have their places, but modern tapes are reliable.
I have asked a person who deals with reading thousands of 'old' tapes. My question was what failure rate would you expect on 1,000 10 year old LTOs. The answer was about 10, but typically more than zero and less than 20. I would expect a much higher failure rate from disk drives that had been on the shelf for 10 years.
You see, we are back to anecdata[1] and expectations.
What I am saying is that we miss real world data, as an example the periodical Backblaze report:
https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html
last one:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q1-2020/
provides real world data (on reliability of disk drives in operation, not stocked on a shelf) and the differences between disks of different makes/models (and if you go a few years back also different technologies) are noticeable.Â
That kind of data allows to draw some conclusions, with tapes we have contrasting reports, all - for one reason or the other - either biased (in good faith) or too generic to be of real use.
I am sure that generically speaking tapes (LTO's) are reliable, until of course you need some data and by chance you can't get it. (BTW exactly the same can be said of hard disks and of optical media).
jaclaz
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[1] No offence intended to you or to your reference person[2], but it is not like all LTO tapes (media) and all LTO tapes (drives) are the same, we don't have any data on temperature and humidity where they were stored for ten years, etc., etc.
[2] which BTW since he/she manages thousands of old tapes, most probably has a much-more-than-average competence in using them, very good hardware, knows all tricks of the trade (+1) etc.