Episode Details

LTO magnetic tape has quietly powered enterprise archival storage for 25 years — and it's still in active development, now at generation 10 with 40TB cartridges. This episode digs into how Linear Tape-Open works, why its famous backward-compatibility chain just broke for the first time, and what a revised roadmap says about tape's limits. We also explore why tape keeps winning the economics and resilience races against disk and SSD, what shoe-shining and LTFS mean for real-world operations, and whether the long-running theory that Google Takeout is slow because your data lives on tape actually holds up. Episode #486384 — open it directly at myweirdprompts.com/486384