Tape is also an extraordinarily poor option for a service like Internet Archive which intends to provide interactive, on-demand access to its holdings.

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EvanAnderson 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I presume backing-up the archive is a desirable thing. That's a place where I would see tape fitting well for them.

	▲	duskwuff an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Perhaps? But unless tape, and the infrastructure to support it, is dramatically cheaper than disk, they might still be better served by more disk - having two or more copies of data on disk means that both of them can service load, whereas a tape backup is only passively useful as a backup.

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stonogo 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is a common use for tape, which can via tools like HPSS have a couple petabytes of disk in front of it, and present the whole archive in a single POSIX filesystem namespace, handling data migration transparently and making sure hot data is kept on low-latency storage.