Fujifilm to boost tape production 5x as AI fuels archiving demand

Anyone that's never had the (dis)pleasure of working with tapes, there's some gotchas to know about before archiving and forgetting about it.

When you create an archive, do not skip the step of reading it back. I'm not talking about just having the system confirm it is readable. I mean actually restoring the data from the tape. I've had tapes fail to retrieve data off of the tape even though the writing app confirmed it was readable.

Drives can have issues reading data written by another drive. Drives can have issues reading a tape it wrote itself.

Why write one when you can write two at twice the time/cost? In all of my experience with tape, I've never written just one tape. In the early days of DVDs, the images were written to LTO to send to have the discs pressed. Two were always sent on the chance one wasn't readable and schedules were so tight that the loss of a couple of days to send a new tape would wreck delivery dates. Another facility wrote three tapes: one kept on site, one sent to IronMountain, one sent to the client directly. Plenty of occasions saw the local copy unreadable and the IronMountain copy was retrieved. These were managed by large robotic tape libraries so each tape was written in a different drive at the same time so it was 3x cost while only 1x time.

Use the drive cleaning cassette as recommended. Your dirty heads can cause the data to not be written/read correctly depending on which head is dirty. If you're having issues reading, clean the heads before giving up on the tape. If you're having issues reading a tape just written, do not think someone else will be able to read it.

Ensure whoever might be using a tape you've written understands what was used to write the tape. Not all archivers are compatible. If you use the tar command to write to tape, people using a GUI app won't be able to read it.

There goes my hope for niche new production of pack films! :( (not really serious obviously)

If you want to take advantage of tape's low cost per TB for your own data backups, without the big capex of tape hardware, I heartily recommend rustic's cold storage support for Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive. It ends up being $1/TB/month, as long as you plan to not restore from it. (Use it as a secondary backup, and plan to restore from your primary.) I have been using rustic+GDA for about a year now, and I contributed some enhancements to this software ecosystem to make this path smooth for others. With this solution, I am no longer tempted to buy my own tape hardware!

[1]: https://rustic.cli.rs/docs/commands/init/cold_storage.html

I came across this website that provides LTO tape pricing references (I have no affiliation with the site).

LTO-10 30TB: $259–$300 per cartridge (~$8.63–$10/TB) LTO-10 40TB: $491–$555 per cartridge (~$12.28–$13.88/TB) LTO-9 18TB: $92–$129 per cartridge (~$5.14–$7.17/TB)

https://tapebackup.org/lto-tape-price-trend/lto10-price

One thing worth noting is that the tape cartridges themselves aren't necessarily the biggest expense. Standalone LTO-10 drives are currently listed at around $25,000.

Why can't they make an attractively priced pro-sumer tape drive solution?

Tape is a fascinating technology, I recall reading the account of the SONY cofounder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_Japan:_Akio_Morita_and... and the crazy things they were trying to make their own tape media because they had no supply because of the war. They were ultimately successful in creating a compact tape machine but they had to build up their expertise in tape media from literally nothing.

The cost of tape is a big deal for for some bigger science experiments.

They often cost billions to build and they take loads of data, but most of it ends up heavily distilled by the time it goes to the final analysis pipeline, so keeping the raw data on tape is pretty common.

There was a time when tape was more specialized and we were worried about loosing our limited suppliers. The explosion in the ML that powers search and more recently the AI boom makes the technology look a lot more stable these days, which is a relief for us.

It's quite a neat thing that each AI lab is effectively archiving all human content ever as a curated dataset. Would absolutely love to work on that team.

BluRay M-Disks are cheaper and more resistant to humidity / heat.

Surely it’s AI, and not harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks, right?

What happened to glass cubes etched with data at layers even more densely packed than bluray?

There might be a huge potential for an AI which scrapes your (and my!) data and concludes what I can safely delete, saving the world tons of resources.

The millions of pictures I never got to sort, the multiple versions of a file that I wrote 2 years ago, etc.

But in the view of an AI-company that's probably a paradox. All this data is charged and could be used to learn more about me, it should never be deleted! Instead, some hole should be carved out of a mountain to store it, billing me every month!

Fuji again saved by disruption.

All the data AI vendors are slurping to surveil us needs to be stored for later, when they get enough compute to start taking advantage of it.

As time goes by, people are sending more and more. It started with just prompts, then the local source code, then calendar, emails, local files...

Shameless plug : for those who plan to try out tapes, time to re-post my blog article "Managing tape drives and libraries with the Unix/Linux CLI" :)

https://blogs.intellique.com/tech/2022/01/27#TapeCLI

Tape is the best data archive medium, and I will die on that hill. Use disks only at your own peril.

it's fascinating how the general direction became to never delete data. All the attempts of taking a photo, all the downloads of bank-statements, all the useless emails.

At some point in the future the amount of data being stored indiscriminately must consume such a huge amount of resources and cost, that it becomes a hidden fixed cost within a country's GDP, without any tangible benefit...

As if they weren't already sitting on a big enough pile of cash with Instax. Damn Fujifilm, always in the best plans.

I have worked in tape for years. We can really tell there is a big boom after years of the market not doing super well.

Still an open question: How does S3 Glacier Deep Archive do it? Tape has been theorized but I’ve also heard arguments for very slow flash…

As storage costs have risen, cheaper tape technogy becomes more valuable

If only they'd boost film production too

Need it for my NAS that I will never make.

I bought a fujifilm film camera 3 years ago.. it was about 300usd, now it is 2000usd, what is going on?

Fujifilm is pretty clearly trying to sell shovels in this market bubble. I haven't read the latest, but I would suspect their clientele has moved from cloud backups to AI training data, and they need to make a big show and dance of ramping production to join the bubble.

maybe they should 5x the production of 35mm film, too.

The cost of backing up slop gets added to the cost of generating it in the first place, I suppose.

Ridiculous that there is no proper data archiving solution for the masses. Tapes... in 2026 at exorbitant prices. Blu ray taps out at 128GB, meh. The DVDs I wrote 20 years ago still perform well and each of them readable, so don't tell me there wouldn't be a market for this at proper prices.

Cloud backup is good until a new world war erupts since data centers are gonna be bombarded first.

What is going on with cerabyte?

Sigh, I recently got into stereo photography and saw there's a shortage of transparency film. I suppose the stock's not coming back up any time soon. We can't even take photos thanks to the clankers can we.

I would have thought this is for archiving pre-slop-era data, but archiving slop might be archaeologically interesting too.

I don't understand, why don't these companies backup their data into the cloud? /s

That's what they keep telling everyone else for years now...

Not affiliated but I have to share.

Point.de

Point archival gateway.

Beautiful. I love it.