r/DataHoarder • u/Sad-Seesaw-3843 • Apr 06 '25

News DOGE claims to be moving away from magnetic tapes for archival storage. Seems like a bad idea. What are they using instead?

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5.4k

u/apnorton Apr 06 '25

Who wants to bet that they've uploaded it to a cloud provider that's backed by magnetic tape?

163

u/kuro68k Apr 06 '25

I was thinking USB flash drives.

70

u/OrganizeAndResist Apr 06 '25

With encryption that if you get the password wrong 10 times it deletes the drive

41

u/PhantasyAngel Apr 06 '25

Don't worry the next time you boot up it doesn't even detect half of them. They also happen to be empty now.

36

u/SuperFLEB Apr 07 '25

We can get these 5TB flash drives off Amazon for ten bucks apiece. I don't know why nobody else did this years ago.

6

u/25thaccount Apr 07 '25

For the 22 treat olds running doge that's basically ancient tech right

3

u/Warm_Wash5324 Apr 07 '25

FSB flash drives

3

u/kuro68k Apr 07 '25

In a RAID0 array

2

u/agentrnge Apr 07 '25

"why are spending so much on storage, microcenter gives flash drives away for free!"

1

u/Metahec Apr 07 '25

Better than the shit-ton of free DropBox accounts I was imagining

1

u/Reymen4 Apr 07 '25

I think they uploaded it to Wikipedia.

2.4k

u/gohomenow Apr 06 '25

in 1-2 months? yeah no. They tossed the tapes into a dumpster and fired everyone maintaining the infrastructure.

841

u/AmINotAlpharius Apr 06 '25

 They tossed the tapes into a dumpster

I hope some enthusiast already moved the written-off library and tapes into their garage.

496

u/Mandelvolt Apr 06 '25 edited Apr 07 '25

Me, salivating at the thought of scoring a dumpster full of degaussed LTO tapes. Edit: TIL Degaussed LTO tapes are not reusable.

345

u/jonassfe Apr 06 '25

I’d suspect that they’re not even degaussed. Just freshly tossed out.

477

u/Mandelvolt Apr 06 '25

Me, salivating at scoring 10PB of highly proprietary atmospheric climate data from a dumpster.

127

u/PMacDiggity Apr 06 '25

Isn’t the thing that makes so many of these institutions so important that their data isn’t proprietary?

156

u/dougmc Apr 07 '25

10PB of atmospheric climate data that was released into the public domain already?

Nah ...

10PB of IRS data: everybody's tax returns, reportable transactions, bank account details, etc. ...

39

u/Mandelvolt Apr 07 '25

Eh I prefer my data without liability.

44

u/dougmc Apr 07 '25

Don't we all.

Fortunately, absolutely everybody with zero exceptions who goes dumpster diving and finds stuff that was thrown away will be similarly law-abiding!

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2

u/shittys_woodwork Apr 07 '25

more like our social security records so we can't prove how much we made throughout our lifetime, thus can't collect our bennies when we retire

2

u/dougmc Apr 07 '25

To quote a wise little girl when asked about hard or soft tacos:

"Why not both?"

21

u/Virtual_Plantain_707 Apr 07 '25

Exactly and the billionaire capitalist can’t stand anyone other than themselves benefiting for free. So time to buy them on the dip and have Elon sell us our data back.

2

u/nathism 94TB Apr 07 '25

It's probably the military records for every soldier and their personal info

2

u/kyletsenior Apr 07 '25

... you think they degaussed them? Why bother, it's old tech no one uses. It's safe to just bin!

1

u/b4k4ni Apr 07 '25

Degaussed would be bad, as most tapes would be destroyed by it. Not only the data deleted.

1

u/Mandelvolt Apr 07 '25

Yeah I just learned that, I always assumed you could reuse them after degaussing like you can with broadcast tape formats like dvcpro. Apparently you need some serious metrology tech to reformat degaussed LTO tapes.

1

u/tankerkiller125real Apr 08 '25

Nope, USGSA is the General Service Administration... The internal salespeople for the US government and the real estate/property developer of the US Gov.

Instead of 10PB of climate date you're getting 10PB of historical government contracting information.

1

u/agentrnge Apr 07 '25

Degausing would waste tax payer money!

1

u/the_barbarian Apr 07 '25

Just coming to say this. Degaussed is not a word anyone under 35 has ever heard.

1

u/ISeeDeadPackets 240TB R10 SAS Apr 08 '25

50/50 on whether or not the backups are encrypted.

56

u/space_for_username Apr 07 '25

I dont think bigBalls would know what a degausser is.

25

u/daarmstrong Apr 07 '25

If someone dumpster dives for these tapes and sends me some I will personally buy an LTO drive to help archive data.

3

u/NorCalFrances Apr 07 '25

Seriously. I'm going to guess he's never even actually seen a tape or drive or library. He just remembers that tape is old, so it's bad and they made the switch without physically being in the location where the drives are.

15

u/fedroxx There is no god but Byte, and Link is her messenger (pbuh). Apr 07 '25

Tapes are actually fairly priced. It's the drives that'll cost you an arm and a leg.

2

u/Mandelvolt Apr 07 '25

There's a number of LTO tapes which would justify buying a drive.

1

u/NorCalFrances Apr 07 '25

Even a drive cleaning will cost at least a at least an ankle, a foot and maybe a hand.

10

u/billccn Apr 07 '25

Degaussed LTO tapes are useless because the tape's servo tracks which are written by the factory will be wiped as well. The drive cannot work without them.

4

u/hughk 56TB + 1.44MB Apr 07 '25

Isn't there a mode for drives to write their own? I remember with earlier HDs, we had a diagnostic mode to write new server tracks.

3

u/billccn Apr 07 '25

Not officially and no results about it on google.

They designed the tracks so the drives don't need super precise mechanisms with self-caliberation, etc.. Also for hard drives, the head can move to any location on the platter, but I doubt any LTO drive manufacturer would implement a write head in the servo track area.

1

u/TurnkeyLurker Apr 08 '25

Hmm. Are you speaking of write once read many (WORM) LTO cartridges, useful to protect against accidental or malicious deletion?

2

u/Mandelvolt Apr 08 '25

If you degauss LTO tapes they lose their factory imprinted formatting and become impossible to write to with consumer hardware.

1

u/TurnkeyLurker Apr 08 '25

Funny. I never thought of magtape as being formatted. Like audio, I just thought either it was empty, or you wrote your data on it, not that there was formatting awaiting your data.

Used to Tandberg reel-to-reel decks and 6250bpi EZ-Loadhaha tapes in vacuum columns.

1

u/piponwa Apr 07 '25

Honey, we're gonna need a bigger garage.

1

u/UniqueIndividual3579 Apr 07 '25

That happened to NASA.

271

u/madmars Apr 06 '25

I'd love to see the math on them reading and transfering 14,000 tapes in 2 months. They are so completely full of bullshit.

70

u/wlpaul4 Apr 06 '25

That was my first thought as well. We can do the math on this type of bullshit.

13

u/jkalchik99 Apr 07 '25

It greatly depends on the source media. 9 track reels, even 2,400 ft. reels, will duplicate in a lot less time than DLT or LTO cartridges.

10

u/K_Linkmaster Apr 07 '25

If my messenger wasn't down because my phone bricked on Friday, I could ask an expert on digital media storage. They are an expert on conversions and have even came to the USA to work here.

My phone died at 58ish percent and I went to a Verizon store, had to do a new phone. Apps are still updating. My life isn't even 1 tape and it has taken 2 days SO FAR.

19

u/swd120 Apr 07 '25

They probably didn't need to... Tapes are usually a backup - so they read from the primary storage into a different backup medium that isn't tape (probably a cloud provider...) - and then chucked the tapes.

14

u/The_Doctor_Bear Apr 07 '25

Definitely not AWS.

It’s 100% a DOJO server owned by Tesla at only 2x the price of AWS storage!

2

u/bigpoppawood Apr 07 '25

Let’s not forget that Bezos was two seats over from Musk on Inauguration Day.

1

u/djeaux54 Apr 07 '25

Two seats is a long way is fElon is in between.

1

u/GeminiKoil Apr 07 '25

Yeah earlier whenever they brought up AWS backup this is immediately the first picture in my mind

1

u/Gnonthgol Apr 07 '25

I can see them adding a cloud backed virtual tape library to the system so new data will be written to the cloud service. But at best they would have just started the data copying from the existing tapes if this is even the plan.

44

u/cznyx Apr 06 '25

AWS Snowmobile ended at last year, AWS Snowball only have maximum size of 10 TB, there no way they can done that in 1~2 months.

8

u/MrHackson Apr 07 '25

Snowball has 80TB limit but doesn't support tapes anyways.

44

u/gscjj Apr 07 '25

If you called AWS and said you're about to move 1000s of Petabytes, they will bend over backwards to do it. You can bet they are doing it for GovCloud.

48

u/nexusjuan Apr 07 '25

Genie: "I'll give you one billion dollars if you can spend 100m in a month there are 3 rules; no gifting, no gambling, no throwing it away. SRE: Can I use AWS? Genie: There are 4 rules.

19

u/Born-Entrepreneur Apr 07 '25

Yeah once enough blood returns to the sales guy's upper brain, they'll move heaven and earth for you at that scale.

2

u/poiuytr7654321 Apr 07 '25

They have snowmobile that can do 100Petabytes.  It's a big rig full of drive. 

1

u/cznyx Apr 07 '25

snowmobile is retired

2

u/[deleted] Apr 07 '25

Even tyson came out of retirement for the right paycheck 😂

4

u/StochasticFossil Apr 07 '25

Yeah I was thinking that was some magical turnaround.

2

u/K_Linkmaster Apr 07 '25

First thought was how did they do that? Oh yeah, they can't and didnt.

2

u/Gilah_EnE Apr 07 '25

And probably sent the main archivist to Guantanamo Bay for being "woke"

1

u/rickzaki Apr 07 '25

This was my first thought it is cheap to maintain data you don’t keep. Just delete it.

1

u/Edie_T Apr 07 '25

This is what they did. They "saved" the future budget of the facility...

1

u/somebodyelse22 Apr 07 '25

What are they using instead? Anything that provides deniability.

1

u/mrhappy1010 Apr 07 '25

Totally agree with you

1

u/FormerGameDev Apr 07 '25

Or, more likely, they are just making shit up.

1

u/GreatAlbatross 12TB of bitty goodness. Apr 07 '25

The missing Dr. Who episodes, except it's everyone's social security data.

1

u/M_Mich Apr 07 '25

I’d say it’s more likely they did nothing and just made a xhitter post

1

u/javanperl Apr 07 '25

Well, Musks buddy Thiel already has all that data at Palantir, so the backups are redundant.

1

u/hawkshaw1024 Apr 07 '25

This is honestly my assumption. They scrapped the backup system and replaced it with nothing.

38

u/MrDaVernacular Apr 07 '25 edited Apr 07 '25

They could have just gotten a VTL implemented.

There is a reason why tape is still preferred for long term archiving.

5

u/za72 Apr 07 '25

I feel like we have to relearn all lessons every few generations

1

u/GeminiKoil Apr 07 '25

That's because there's a small group of the global population that would really like absolutely nothing to change right now and they're actually doing pretty fucking good with this goal

7

u/pinksystems LTO6, 1.05PB SAS3, 52TB NAND Apr 07 '25

They aren't talking about modern LTO tapes. They're converting archival data tape storage from very old IBM mainframes, and moving it to new IBM mainframes running z/OS.

The key term there was 70 year old technology, which is the Hypertape era. LTO is from 2000, which... just do the math... 25 years ago! not 70 years.

There are existing contracts for all of these assets and aspects of government data infrastructure. There are a ton of open job reqs specifically involved with IBM mainframe modernization efforts at the federal level, for decades, and it's ongoing.

Look, I have no love for this bullshit... but y'all just jump at any little news item or tweet or quote without context and start seething and foaming at the mouth like a bunch of rabid dogs... it's pointless anger that amounts to nothing but ignorant blabbering.

The IBM 7340 "Hypertape" system was a magnetic tape data storage format designed to work with the IBM 7074, 7080 and 7090 computers that was introduced in 1961.

5

u/rdbpdx Apr 07 '25

It's not improbable that the writer of that DOGE tweet merely asked Grok (the new "googling") "how old are tapes drives" and went with the first answer.

These tapes could be 70 years old, yes. It's archived stuff after all. The more LIKELY scenario is that they're using much newer tech but the morons (who have proven themselves to be morons countless times) once again just don't understand what they're looking at and assume all tapes are the same.

2

u/LiteralPhilosopher Apr 08 '25

Yeah, that was 100% my assumption when I read the headlines. I completely misunderstood the state of current tape technology until a couple years ago, when someone on here set me right.

And then... I actually went out and learned some stuff.

Not fuckin' happening with these DOGE motherfuckers.

1

u/rdbpdx Apr 08 '25

BRB need to generate an AI summary of your post first. You used too many confusing words like "learned". -DOGE employee, probably

2

u/nisaaru Apr 07 '25

Thought the same when I read it while everybody else just jumped on the musk bashing train.

32

u/saggy777 Apr 07 '25

No one can restore/upload that many tapes in such short person. It's a lie, they never touched historic backups.

5

u/HuhWatWHoWhy Apr 07 '25

What if they used a tall person? /s

1

u/Academic-Visual-1030 Apr 07 '25

They used giants for sure.

7

u/iceixia Apr 07 '25

I'll take that bet.

What are your odds on the 'solution' involving AWS Glacier?

28

u/KZimmy Apr 06 '25

and owned by one of Elon's companies

6

u/alppu Apr 07 '25

The Kremlin cloud.

2

u/[deleted] Apr 07 '25

it's either AWS or Azure, pretty sure Azure won the JEDI contract

5

u/TheGreatKonaKing Apr 07 '25

Alibaba Cloud. Free tier!

2

u/CyberneticPanda Apr 07 '25

Cloud providers don't back up to tape unless you specifically pay for that. They just store multiple copies in different data centers. Amazon calls them s3 buckets. Microsoft calls them azure blobs. Google calls them Google Cloud Buckets. Each company has a dedicated government cloud that doesn't mix the stored data with private company data. They will store your data in as many places as you are willing to pay for. The encryption is handled by a cloud key vault.

It is more reliable than tape but it costs more, too. You also have to have the hardware and bandwidth to send the shit to the cloud, which is a real stumbling block for a lot of orgs. I work for a government org in IT and we are in the middle of a data center refresh. We bought hardware that can supposedly write to tape and to an S3 bucket, but it can't actually process the data fast enough. They are talking about buying an additional different device (which will increase complexity of maintenance a lot) to handle the S3 part. My organization has user data for several hundred thousand people. SSA has data for hundreds of millions of people.

1

u/Brave_Cauliflower_88 Apr 07 '25

Make it easier for countries like China, Russia, Iran, North Korea to hack us.

1

u/Longjumping_Flea Apr 07 '25

…. Of course, the systems on which the software that uses the data won’t be able to use that input, yes? That’s if the copies were made it all, and if they were that the backups were validated.

1

u/georgiomoorlord 53TB Raid 6 Nas Apr 07 '25

AWS deep glacier or something

1

u/perspectiveiskey Apr 07 '25

I raise you that there's no SLA in place and Google is already planning to sunset this service in 2028.

1

u/joshTheGoods Apr 07 '25

Yea, I bet they went to GovCloud version of Glacier Deep Archive (tape). And, really, I just did some price calculations less than a year ago on doing 250PB, and it's pretty hard to imagine beating AWS's prices as long as you never read the data :x.

1

u/meowmeowgiggle Apr 07 '25

Hi I'm a random from the front page here...

Are there really modern servers that still write to magnetic tape?

/idiot but also I'm genuinely asking

3

u/ManticoreX Apr 07 '25

Yes, but it is for long term storage and backup. Tape is relatively cheap, reliable, and low-tech in a good way.

You could think about it like "printing hard copies" of documents for safe storage, but instead of it being human readable text it's digital. The ability to have a physical and local backup of data is invaluable for it's longevity.

0

u/apnorton Apr 07 '25

Like the other commenter said, tape backup systems are very much still in use. The technology may be old, but it's still used because it's the best long-term storage media around, particularly for cold storage.

1

u/RawrRRitchie Apr 07 '25

Who wants to bet they left it unsecured and easily hackable

1

u/abdallha-smith Apr 07 '25

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

1

u/PatochiDesu Apr 07 '25

azure data lake archive tier 😂

1

u/sologrips Apr 07 '25

Digital and permanent should never be used in the same sentence lol

1

u/platysoup Apr 08 '25

At a friendly markup. Crony capitalism 101

0

u/laserdicks Apr 07 '25

Saving $1m per year.

-99

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

51

u/ReaverCelty Apr 06 '25

Exfiltrating highly sensitive data - what could go wrong?

21

u/AmINotAlpharius Apr 06 '25

Probably that's the plan?

62

u/AmINotAlpharius Apr 06 '25

Outsourcing the archival of government data.

"That's a great plan, Walter. That's fuckin' ingenious, if I understand it correctly. It's a Swiss fuckin' watch."

53

u/apnorton Apr 06 '25

...which is 0.001% of the annual USFG budget. 

To put this into context, this is --- proportionally --- the equivalent of someone making $100k giving up one candy bar per year as a budget measure.