Elon Musk ’s government efficiency initiative continues to play havoc . In a late berth on X , the Department of Government Efficiency proudly proclaimed that the General Services Administration has converted 14,000 magnetic tapes of archival information to digital record book .
“ The@USGSAIT squad just lay aside $ 1 M per year by converting 14,000 magnetic tapes ( 70 yr old technology for information storage ) to lasting advanced digital criminal record , ” the position reads .
While the move may at first seem like a logical determination to modernize government services , critics were immediate to point out the benefits of charismatic tapes over digital . The station by DOGE features a Community Note play up a few intellect to habituate charismatic tape , include the fact that they can store data much more efficiently and bid a physical “ airgap ” so that data can not be slip by cybercriminals .
Hulton Archive/Getty
Back in 2020 , IBMpublished an articleexplaining that as the amount of data stack away on the cyberspace balloon year after year , large companies and educational institutions have grow to tape recording - found computer storage for archival purposes . “ In footing of cost , storing data point on tape is pennies per gigabyte and when not in use , tape requires no energy unlike hard disks and flash , ” the company write . “ Put simply , mag tape - store data ensures that cloud provider will have the data they call for when they need it . In improver , when lay in decently , data recorded on tape measure today will still be readable in 30 years . ”
Anyone who has been on the internet do it the frustration of old websites and social internet go offline , effectively wiping out Brobdingnagian amounts of human introduction in one brutal slide . Some administration like the Internet Archive have ill-treat in to facilitate preserve websites before they are lost to meter , but one administration can only do so much . connection rot , as it is called , is in effect a consequence of storage costs , but magnetized tapes are dirt cheap . The intermediate magnetic tape recording today can store around 15 terabytes of data , but IBM say that new tapes it has been developing could lay in up to580terabytes . adverse to what DOGE said in its post , tape measure technology stay on to get skillful .
Cloud servers , meanwhile , are high-priced to mesh , and tough drives , in general , can last up to five to ten years . Major company like Meta and Google expend RAID backups to prevent data point from being corrupted and lost , but again , that is expensive . It is kind of ironic that a squad task with lowering costs in the government may be doing the exact opposite with this move .
Credit: XKCD
And also , in a sense , the phrase “ permanent digital records ” is an oxymoron . Digital is inherently ephemeral — it is why some hoi polloi still prefer have physical copies of their media . A service shuts down and your digital memories go with it . XKCD yr agocreated an imagethat explain the frustration succinctly :
cloudDOGEElon Muskstorage
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