[bt848]

LTO doesn't suffer from those things. Shock can destroy the case and dislodge the leader pin of an LTO cartridge but AFAIK it can't damage the data on the tape. Water is bad for the transport but as long as you dry your tapes out they should still work. The operating specs for LTO are crazy, you can read and write them under all practical atmospheric conditions.

[mkj]

Smoke haze will cause all kinds of trouble for tape drives though.

[bacon_waffle]

As will very dry conditions. The IceCube neutrino telescope at South Pole used LTO-3 tapes to store data until they switched to only hard drives around 5 years ago. At that point, the newer tape drives had been tried (IIRC LTO-5 was the industry standard by then) but they never seemed to work, presumably because the humidity on station is incredibly low. It was considered more reasonable to keep the old LTO-3 equipment in use, versus building a humidor for the tapes and drives.

[zaarn]

So don't run the backups when the DC is on fire, got it.

[ramraj07]

Mr. Robot was a liar!