What we actually do

Sizing and deployment of LTO libraries, from a standalone drive to a multi-slot robot
Integration with production storage and the MAM, so archiving runs on its own
Migration from one tape generation to the next, without stopping production
Recovery of legacy archives: orphan tapes, vanished drives, lost catalogues
Periodic verification of tapes and of restores

Why tape, still

The question comes up on every project, and it is a fair one: why put media on a technology everyone assumed was obsolete?

Because nothing has replaced it for the same job. An LTO-9 cartridge holds 18 TB native, draws nothing sitting on a shelf, and keeps for decades. The cloud bills every month, and above all it bills egress: the day you have to pull 200 TB back because a series is revived, the transfer invoice dwarfs what the storage ever cost you.

Tape does not compete with your production disks. It is the last tier — the one you rarely touch and must find intact ten years from now.

The questions we get

“How long does an LTO tape last?” Manufacturers quote 30 years in stable storage conditions. In practice it is not the tape that fails first, it is the ability to read it: an LTO drive reads only two generations back. An LTO-5 tape will not mount in an LTO-9 drive. Migration determines the real lifespan of your archive, not the medium.

“LTO-8 or LTO-9?” LTO-9 if you are starting fresh: 18 TB versus 12, and two more generations of future compatibility. LTO-8 makes sense when you already own a fleet of cartridges and a working drive — the value sits in the tapes you own, not in the drive.

“Robot or standalone drive?” It depends on who does the archiving. A standalone drive means someone swaps cartridges by hand — which holds as long as one person genuinely owns the task, and collapses the week they are away. The moment archiving has to happen unattended, you need a robot.

“Can we migrate without stopping production?” Yes, and that is the normal way to do it. The old library stays in service while the new one is built alongside. We cut over in batches, with a way back at every step.

“Are our old tapes still recoverable?” Often yes, even when the catalogue is gone and nobody remembers what is on them. We assess the condition, read what reads, and tell you honestly what will not come back.

What makes an archive fail

The catalogue lives in one person’s head. The day they leave, you own cartridges with no index. Archive software is not an accessory: it is the thing that knows what sits on which tape.

Nobody tests restores. An archive that has never been restored has never been verified. We put periodic verification in place — a sample restored at regular intervals, the way you test a generator.

Both copies sleep in the same room. A single-copy archive, stored beside the servers it protects, guards against very little.

A drive was bought without software. Writing to tape is easy. Finding one specific file, three years later, on one cartridge out of sixty, is the software’s job.

What we deploy

We integrate libraries from brands common in this industry, driven by archive software proven in media production — Archiware and EditShare ARK, depending on the environment. The choice is not made from a catalogue: it follows what your archive has to connect to — your production storage, your MAM, your existing workflows.

Our track record

We have maintained tape archive chains for years, for clients whose production cannot stop.

At Cirque du Soleil, the EditShare platform we designed and maintained over seven years included its ARK archive chain and LTO library, through the renewals and migrations that seven years demand.

At RMD, the design of off-site post-production storage in a data centre included an LTO-9 library and Archiware, integrated with the disaster-recovery nearline and quality control.

That kind of duration is what separates an archive that holds from one you discover is unreadable at the worst possible moment.