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other thoughts

Sneakernet

[Today’s run: 3 miles on the treadmill]

I was thinking about data storage a few days ago and an old quote came back to me: Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tapes.

That and other interesting stories can be found on the wikipedia page for sneakernet, the transfer of data by physically moving magnetic media from point A to point B.

My old job has talked to me about doing some work for them, restoring a sampling of old backup tapes, sort out the contents and write the interesting stuff to removable HDD. We have over 5 years of weekly backup tapes with about 1500 GBytes on each tape. That tape cabinet holds (52 X 5 X 1500 =) 390,000 GBytes of data.

Fortunately a lot of it is repeated over and over.

I think our plan will be to take one tape from each month. That’s still a hefty amount.