[Twirrim]

> Tape backups are still a thing in some places, but they are generally considered a relic of the past.

Well that's utter BS. Tape is still a dominant backup form, particularly for archival purposes. The market is big and still growing year on year.

You can't get the same data density and portability out of any other form of backup, and it is a format still under heavy development and refreshes, with LTO-9 due out this year introducing 45TB media at 1GB/s.

[GekkePrutser]

I think by that they referred to audio cassette tapes specifically, not the custom tapes used for backups these days nor the tape reels of the 60s/70s. They don't use audio as an intermediate format like the 8-bit era tape drives did. As cleaning up this audio is the main gameplay mechanic here, it makes sense that that sentence refers to audio tapes specifically.

[cawigames]

Yes, I confirm that. The game will operate on 2 levels: audio tweak and software processing on 8bit era data.

The main appeal about 8bit era is that the data quantity is low, and this allows some nice bit level gameplay mechanics.

This works nicely on 13-byte (104 bits) headers, but it won't work on gigabyte(8623489024 bits) files. It hasn't stopped me to joke about it: http://caffeinewithdrawalgames.com/games.html#TRS185Tb

[gregsadetsky]

I learned recently that tapes are also quite common in the pro video world, as backup media and as a way to deliver projects!

For instance, this is the Discovery Channel's delivery tech specs: https://procurement-notices.undp.org/view_file.cfm?doc_id=12...

From page 27:

"Production partners must deliver graphics masters on LTO-5 data tapes formatted using the Linear Tape File Systems (LTFS). [...] The network will not accept graphics masters on other types of media."

[Zenst]

One of the biggest things that has been going for tape as archive/backup storage has been that it is proven durability compared to alternatives in regards to bit rot. AT least that was the mantra for decades, not been active for years so may of shifted and price of solid state and storage rotation I would of thought offset things. But then that would be a live backup as opposed to something you want to archive and maybe never touch for eons, maybe for some regulation aspect you just need to archive that data and in a form that is acceptable to the standards of that industry. Which would be another factor and that would be legacy - it works, it has worked for ages and proven and trusted in X use for X industry regulatory needs and as such - ticks an insurance/liability box. Things like that from a technical aspect get overlooked as it is not just the technical aspect but also the whole industry/business/regulatory standards.

I know for one company in the pharma industry we looked at optical storage and for some uses it was fine, but for the long-term archival aspect in your store and 99.999999% forget about storage backups/archives it just didn't tick enough box's due to being unproven and when you get down to use X and if it fails you can say you did all the right things and if you use something that technically may be better and it fails, your head and massive fines and fallout can ensure much more easily. So tape for many been one of those - it works, why change.

[cawigames]

Tape still has big advantages over other mediums: it's relatively cheap in terms of price/Gb, it's a lot less complex than hard drives, and a lot more recoverable than SSDs.

On the other side, it has minute-long seek times since the tape needs to be rewonund/ff (that's an eternity compared to already-deprecated milisecond-long HDD seek times) and it's not suitable for many write cycles (some tapes are even sold as WORM (write once read many), same as the old CD-R drives)

[cawigames]

Yes, fully agree. Tape has evolved a great deal over the years, and it will further evolve.

Just look at the lto roadmap. They are expecting 480Tb(yes, Tb) tapes https://www.ltoultrium.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/lto-ro... http://vrworld.com/2014/05/05/sonys-new-185-tb-tape-drive-ca...

Unfortunately it's just for the professional market. Looking over some local IT shops, the drives cost around 1500E with 15Tb tapes priced around 80E. I was hoping for a portable tape player able to hold together all the world's music at studio resolution, but that's not going to happen.

[pessimizer]

These are audio cassette backups, Commodore 64 style.

[cawigames]

Tape Recovery Simulator 96K will initially focus on audio-casette data, Speccy-style (48K). Commodore 64 and other formats will not be supported, but that could probably change with enough pressure from fans.

[meepmorp]

Not just backups. I bought software for my Atari 400 on audio cassette, back in the day.

[pimlottc]

I mean, they're not wrong about the perception. Ask most people, even those in tech, and they will tell you that tape is passé. Personally, while I know it is still used in enterprise backup, I haven't actually seen a digital tape in use in over 20 years.

[jandrese]

So it takes 12.5 hours to fill a single tape?

I guess it's hard to wrap your head around data sizes that big. It's pretty impressive when you consider that SATA tops out at 600MB/s, so these tape drives need to hang off of a faster bus.

[awiesenhofer]

They do, they are attached via FibreChannel or SAS for example. FC offers 16Gbits since 2011 and SAS 12G since 2013 (and of course even faster versions since then).

Though I would love a SATA-one for home use.

[cawigames]

same here. I would love a tape drive at home. My dji osmo action cam is producing films at 100Mbps. A 1Tb drive can only hold 23h. That's 11.5h if you store the data twice for redundancy.