[Multicomp]

THANK you for doing this (I said, having never so much as logged in to a usenet thingie)!

I do have one question. Those tapes...how old were they? Were they contemporary to the postings? (bonus question: if so wow, but under what justification?. tapes were expensive right and nobody valued archiving at the time (except maybe this guy)?) this individual you got the tapes from meticulously copy onto new media and all the overhead that entails?

Today I make personal backups of things I want to keep, whether local files or web snippets and burn 'em to a DVD , blu-ray, or optical disk of some kind with the justification of 'can't ransomware WORM media'.

However, I don't do the internet archiving guru stuff of '3 copies, 2 mediums, 1 routine' (or something like that) so in a sense my backups are cruising for a bruising in the case that optical disks could go bad, hard drives could die (these I do migrate to new media when I get around to it, CDs I just read and burn to a fresh one), house could burn down, etc.

Partially looking to see if I can get justification for my backup slovenliness ;)

[ericbarrett]

To satisfy the "third place" you might look into storing these files in Amazon S3 Glacier, which is about $1/TB/month, so long as you don't read them back. (Retrieval is delayed, batched, and expensive.)

It would take some engineering: I might store each optical disk image as a compressed image file, for example (zstd would be good for the large amount of data), to avoid metadata charges. Fun to think about.