MagStor Take
When three separate cloud platforms shut down and took irreplaceable media assets with them, the expert preservation community stopped debating and started shipping tape cartridges. Cloud durability guarantees are written around hardware failure modes — not vendor business decisions, human error, or software bugs, which researchers estimate account for the majority of actual data loss in practice. For long-retention M&E archive and backup workflows, LTO tape's air-gap isolation and decade-scale stability are not legacy constraints; they are the specification that cloud storage structurally cannot meet.
The Story
Archival researchers documenting the loss of roughly 50 million songs across multiple cloud platform failures — including a major social media migration, a music service shutdown that deleted user libraries outright, and the collapse of a Hollywood-backed cloud media locker serving tens of millions of accounts — have concluded that cloud TCO at ten-plus-year retention horizons is materially worse than offline tape. Retrieving one petabyte from a leading cold-storage cloud tier costs the equivalent of more than a year's worth of storage fees, and the "eleven nines" durability claims that underpin cloud contracts exclude the real-world failure vectors that account for most documented data loss events. The expert consensus: LTO tape is the authoritative medium for long-duration preservation work.
Source
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