[Bobalu]

I ALWAYS came to grief when I tried to store data on magnetic tape :-/

I hate tape...and I don’t like hard drives that much either.

Optical storage has longevity problems..

I converted to SSD’s a couple months ago...it’s so sweet.

[EEGator]

Worst course I ever took in college, Solid State Devices.
P-n-p, n-p-n, it was so boring.

[dp0622]

Odd story.

I left some 8 packs of batteries near a magnet in my drawer by accident.

They were all dead when I tried to use them some time later.

I was too lazy to look up why.

But it sucked :)

[The Duke]

"I ALWAYS came to grief when I tried to store data on magnetic tape"

TECH: Sorry, but your tape has stretched.

The only good thing about tape was the old HPUX 'ftio' utility. :) (I still love and use 'cpio')

[ImJustAnotherOkie]

The old reel tape drives were pretty fun. Very sophisticated machines.

[no-s]

I ALWAYS came to grief when I tried to store data on magnetic tape :-/

Bummer. The truth is any media is subject to failure. It's a corollary of the general adversity of the universe towards meaningful organization, aka the massive slide into entropy.

Once you recognize this you can provide a engineering solution which accommodates the inevitable with some margin of tolerance...

Speaking as a person who has designed, engineered, and managed massive data processing and storage systems since the era of mag tape reels (which were mounted by hand!) - I can still remember the thrills of processing and ensuring access and fault tolerance and disaster recovery for a tape library that imported thousands of new reels each month. Every day my operators would fill the bin with unrecoverable magtapes. I had hundreds of tape drives, a small herd of lesser mainframes to keep things going, a disk drive farm measurable in acres, and the IBM tech would be working on one or more things every day. Something went wrong every day, and it was in the plan to find it and deal with it. Flash forward 20 years and the same size operation with equivalent tape storage fit on a couple of rack mount cabinets, only because I kept it in two data centers. By 2015 the equivalent fit in 12U of rack space and was online, but we kept multiples in different locations and an off-line tape archive for assuring recoverability guarantees.