Have you ever tried to read a thousand tapes? Weeks. I was once involved in a project to copy old Stanford SAIL backup tapes. They just needed people to load tapes on a drive, wait, unload, and go on to the next tape. Reading a tape took 20 minutes. Transfer time over the Internet to a file server took under a minute.

I haven't, but I'd like to. Anyone who's reading a thousand tapes nowadays must be doing something interesting. :)

Well, probably.

There was a stack of floppy disks sitting on a shelf in an old thrift store. I couldn't help but buy it for $1. What could they contain? They're sitting on my desk right now. I still haven't bought a floppy disk reader, but I'm really curious. I assume a USB floppy disk drive + linux will be enough to dump the raw bytes, but I haven't looked into it. Spelunking around old tech is fascinating for unknown reasons.

Good luck pulling off any usable data, I still remember going through over 100 flopies as a teenager looking for files I had backedup and seeing so many damn read errors.

Although now I'm interested to know what's on those disks you have :-p

The six disks say:

Lotus 2/22/93

Lazarus, (formatted) WP

LAZ6

Backup 13

Backup 12

Backup 11

All the backup discs are scratched out with pen though. I hope they didn't wipe them!

I wonder if lotus still works, and if those backups are sequental. Good luck getting the data!

I think we can update the story to include a stack of usb-accessed petabyte drives.

Or Amazon's purpose build hardware/services.

https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/

https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/

Google: https://cloud.google.com/transfer-appliance/

Microsoft: https://azure.microsoft.com/services/storage/databox/

Interesting how similar the Amazon and Microsoft offerings are, while Google's seems more like just another rack unit aimed at sitting at the customer for an extended period.