DOGE ditches magnetic tape, but experts defend the legacy tech

[Daniel Sims]

Why it matters: Many users, including staffers at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), likely consider magnetic tape storage severely outdated. Despite being around for several decades, the technology still enjoys widespread use, is still evolving, and retains certain advantages over optical and solid-state media.

DOGE recently announced that it has replaced 14,000 magnetic storage tapes used by the US General Services Administration (USGSA) with unspecified "modern" digital formats. The move, which the department says will save $1 million per year, drew sharp criticism from experts who defended the ancient but still useful technology.

The announcement presumably referred to magnetic Linear Tape-Open (LTO) drives and cartridges, a storage medium invented in 1952. Although consumer devices have long since transitioned to hard disk and solid-state drives, which are far faster, businesses still regularly use LTO. IBM plans to continue using the format for decades.

The @USGSA IT team just saved $1M per year by converting 14,000 magnetic tapes (70 yr old technology for information storage) to permanent modern digital records.

– Department of Government Efficiency (@DOGE) April 4, 2025

Companies and government agencies like the USGSA employ magnetic tapes for long-term storage and hybrid cloud solutions for several reasons. Firstly, they store massive amounts of data very cheaply. LTO tapes only held a few megabytes 70 years ago, but IBM continues to develop the technology, introducing a drive in 2023 that holds up to 150TB per cartridge.

Additionally, LTO is more secure than conventional solutions that are regularly connected to the internet. Tapes are kept offline except during backup and recovery, which shields them against cyberattacks.

LTO sales reached record levels in 2022, 70 years after the format's introduction, in response to a surge in ransomware incidents. Although maintaining offline backups won't stop cybercriminals from stealing or publicizing data, and recovery is time-consuming, they blunt the threat of encryption or deletion. Critics worry that the data DOGE converted from LTO could become more vulnerable.

Magnetic tapes also last longer than other digital formats. While some DVDs from less than 20 years ago are starting to suffer from disc rot, LTO can last 30 years if properly maintained, according to Corodata. Additionally, the tapes use less energy than conventional drives, making them attractive for clients aiming for sustainability.

DOGE, established by Elon Musk following President Trump's inauguration to cut government spending, has faced harsh criticism for hastily laying off thousands of employees and gutting agencies. The department has also drawn concern by tasking its extremely young members with handling sensitive government data, including 19-year-old Edward "Big Balls" Coristine, who was previously connected to a cybercrime gang.

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DOGE ditches magnetic tape, but experts defend the legacy tech

 

[The Talking Tech]

Ignorance at its highest display....DOGE supposedly stands for "efficiency" and yet they are replacing highly durable legacy equipment with more expensive highly volatile and not as durable equipment.

Yep, add this to the many terrible Trump decisions.

 

[gdavid65]

A whole "$1M saving per year" .. woa.. massive, sign me up!!

 

[TommyBoyFL]

The first time something goes wrong it will cost much more than 1 million to fix it.

 

[kiwigraeme]

Look Doge just wants good old Aryan efficiency

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Deutsche_Arbeitsfront.svg

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Musk_DOGE_logo.jpg

same 14 cogs of Teutonic beauty .Hugo Boss is designing the new uniforms as we speak

Elon has just spoken out against tariffs, must make efficiencies less effective

You have to feel sorry for Trump voters that didn't want tariffs and just the fascism and hate for trans , immigrants

Even if now can't afford to own much, they can still own the libs, and hopefully a few really cute green M&Ms if pushing the welfare check this week

DOGE is advising sack PhD scientist to go work in factories
Arbeit macht frei!.
We will see the Great Leap forward in the good old USA MAGA!!!

Bet the "experts"extolling tape didn't even say thank you

 

[opckieran]

The agencies I worked for used tape as hot backups, which is not how tape was intended to be used. Leave tape to libraries and cold storage.

 

[JamesBlond]

Ignorance at its highest display....DOGE supposedly stands for "efficiency" and yet they are replacing highly durable legacy equipment with more expensive highly volatile and not as durable equipment.

Yep, add this to the many terrible Trump decisions.

For every 1 bad choice Trump makes there are 1000 stupid choice dumbocrats make

 

[VariableSpike]

So getting rid of a resillient proven archival medium for digital storage that can bit rot to save an insignificant amoint of money in the grand scheme of things, fantastic...

 

[Skjorn]

So getting rid of a resillient proven archival medium for digital storage that can bit rot to save an insignificant amoint of money in the grand scheme of things, fantastic...

This tape is rated for 30 years if maintained well. It's been around since the 1950's. That's almost 80 years. Doesn't seem overdue to anyone??

M-Disc is what they should be using. Tape is kinda silly honestly. Good for the time it was made but we have way better materials now.

Ignorance at its highest display....DOGE supposedly stands for "efficiency" and yet they are replacing highly durable legacy equipment with more expensive highly volatile and not as durable equipment.

Yep, add this to the many terrible Trump decisions.

I wouldn't say 30 years is highly durable, maybe back in 1952 it seemed like a long time.
M-Disc is rated for 1000 years and doesn't take expensive and outdated equipment to use. The only real problem with disc's is capacity.

 

[VariableSpike]

This tape is rated for 30 years if maintained well. It's been around since the 1950's. That's almost 80 years. Doesn't seem overdue to anyone??

M-Disc is what they should be using. Tape is kinda silly honestly. Good for the time it was made but we have way better materials now.
I wouldn't say 30 years is highly durable, maybe back in 1952 it seemed like a long time.
M-Disc is rated for 1000 years and doesn't take expensive and outdated equipment to use. The only real problem with disc's is capacity.

Tape as a concept has been around since the 50's, LTO itself has been around since 2000 and is aj evolving standard, the basic concept of the cartridge size and the like is the same, but the drives and tapes are different across generations hence why the first tapes were 100GB and they are now 18TB, many many times the size, and have proven to be able to sit around for that long, have easy access to archive data at a relatively quick rate, are compact and you can have massive libraries with robot systems already designed to move them around vs something like m disc, where yes, under ideal conditions it will last that long, but how do you transport it safely, ensure the disc won't degrade (and of course the problems with capacity and speeds, which aren't a problem you can solve easily unless you make the discs bigger)
Also it makes it sound like they just want to swap to the data sitting on hard droves that are either online or sitting around if need be, so that's even worse

 

[m4a4]

One thing that isn't clear to me is how much this data was getting used.
Was this only long-term storage that gets used once-in-a-while? Or was it used far more often than that, wasting time (money) getting to and accessing the data?

I can totally see the gov't doing something at a snail's pace (terribly inefficient) because it's what the old people are used to (and get paid to do) lol

Also, it isn't clear if they outright replaced it, or just also digitized it for efficiency (the wording does suggest replacement though).

 

[allanwind]

LTO-9's capacity is 18 TB. "holds up to 150TB per cartridge" is a marketing claim, and it's not even true as you could get anywhere from 18 TB for /dev/random to near infinite for /dev/zero.

 

[Ojref]

Look Doge just wants good old Aryan efficiency

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Deutsche_Arbeitsfront.svg

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Musk_DOGE_logo.jpg

same 14 cogs of Teutonic beauty .Hugo Boss is designing the new uniforms as we speak

Elon has just spoken out against tariffs, must make efficiencies less effective

You have to feel sorry for Trump voters that didn't want tariffs and just the fascism and hate for trans , immigrants

Even if now can't afford to own much, they can still own the libs, and hopefully a few really cute green M&Ms if pushing the welfare check this week

DOGE is advising sack PhD scientist to go work in factories
Arbeit macht frei!.
We will see the Great Leap forward in the good old USA MAGA!!!

Bet the "experts"extolling tape didn't even say thank you

You might want to reconsider your post, its actually racist.

 

[Ffakr]

This tape is rated for 30 years if maintained well. It's been around since the 1950's. That's almost 80 years. Doesn't seem overdue to anyone??

M-Disc is what they should be using. Tape is kinda silly honestly. Good for the time it was made but we have way better materials now.
I wouldn't say 30 years is highly durable, maybe back in 1952 it seemed like a long time.
M-Disc is rated for 1000 years and doesn't take expensive and outdated equipment to use. The only real problem with disc's is capacity.

M-Disk is potentially a decent option for long-term archiving, but a pretty poor choice for backups.

With 100GB max capacity per disk, Its capacity is 1/180th of LTO Ultrium-9's native (uncompressed) capacity and as little as 1/450th of LTO-9 Compressed capacity
So, if you've got a Petabyte of Grant-funded Research data to archive.. that's 10,000 m-disks vs. 56 LTO-9 tapes (fewer with compression).

But what about live, non-archival systems? Sure you can get WORM (write once, read many) LTO tapes when you want to ensure data integrity.. but LTO is mostly used for read/write workloads. If I've got 100TB of data w/ 5TB of modified or new data every month.. an M-Data system will just consume and consume and consume more media, which needs to be managed and purged eventually. LTO can get (and usually is) reused as old backup sets are aged out and overwritten and as file retention times come up. .. because we don't necessarily need every revision of a memo that was written 8, let alone 800 years ago.

And as to 30 years not being too durable.. how durable do you need your media to be?
If you have files/data sets that will need to be preserved for more than a few years.. that's pretty much the definition of an Archive.
Sure, use m-disk for archival data that needs a VERY long retention time.. and lock it away in a vault for future generations. But how much of the data generated by or collected by the Federal Government needs to be preserved that long? Mindlessly collecting data is actually a bad thing. If you just keep writing to disk after disk... tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of them??.. how do you find anything 40 years later?

You're talking about a solution for an entirely different problem than backups. A proper data archiving system should be independent of a backup solution and it's more than just Hardware and Media.. it requires a metadata standard, and markup of everything that's archived so it can be found at a later date.

One last point.. I'd also be a little concerned that M-Disk is basically a very robust DVD or BlueRay media and that the company invented it went bankrupt in Dec. 2016. There's only two companies that are licensed to produce the media too.
M-Disk seems like a dead end for a lot of reasons.. Sure there's a lot of BD drives around today.. but optical media has been dying-out for a while.. and there's no roadmap for continuing development of M-Disk specifically since it's developer went belly up. I assume that licensing that technology any further would also be.. complicated.. to say the least.

LTO, on the other hand, literally stands for "Linear Tape-Open". It's an open standard that anyone can adopt and major vendors like IBM, HP, and Quantum have LTO roadmaps out at least 5 more generations.

Edit: all my numbers are based on LTO-9 tech. Capacities should double when LTO-10 becomes available later this year.

 

[bviktor]

Tape is just awful. Any media that sits on shelves without you ever knowing if it is still readable AT ALL is not considered "backup" in my book.

 

[kiwigraeme]

You might want to reconsider your post, its actually racist.

Do you think that that the Doge emblem looks exactly like the Nazi efficiency one in the cog shape a mere coincidence
Do you think Miller, Bannon , Musk - nazi salute stuff just a mere coincidence.
All Millers, Musk support of far right National parties around the world . Trump whining about Le Penn caught grifting EU funds

The hate against POC, all Trumps vindictive about Africans, Mexicans, Vances remarks . Proud Boys . Trump has discriminated against POC as a businessman , never retracted statements about Central park 5 .
Removing POC war heroes from DOD websites etc is a Trump/Elon directive

We all know what MAGA means

POC are not safe in The USA from your police - nearly everyday some POC is deprived of their rights or shot at by police - Nothing happens.

I stand by my claims - attacks on AOC , Jasmine Crockett, Obama from the based are open and well supported by many MAGA people

The fact is you have normalised it and it's very acceptable to you

No MAGA cared about the hate they are eating cats and dogs , they amplified it and spread more hate - You are part of the problem

My country has racist and hateful people I acknowledge that , I stand up to those people
I will stand here behind my comments . MAGA promotes hate and racism

 

[manowar51]

Instant criticism from people despite us not knowing enough to make that judgement. What tapes are they using? What data is on them? How often do they access them? All these are major considerations when choosing an archive medium. We all know that the US government acts wastefully, and things can be improved so maybe let's let someone try and make things better? Just because it's not your government doing it doesn't mean it can't be done.

One thing I would ask anyone critical of this, is what parts of DOGE do they like? If a person says nothing then move on, they suffer from TDS and arent worth listening to. There is simply no way that everything DOGE does is good or bad. It's going to be a mixed bag.

Oh, and as this seems to have descended into a debate about racism let's just remember that the real racists in the USA are the people who were pushing DEI. They literally wanted to place skin color above ability to do a job when hiring people in the USA. This blatant racial discrimination ended with the current administration and is one of the reasons I voted for them. And I had never voted republican before.

 

[Ben Myers]

Ignorance at its highest display....DOGE supposedly stands for "efficiency" and yet they are replacing highly durable legacy equipment with more expensive highly volatile and not as durable equipment.

Yep, add this to the many terrible Trump decisions.

DOGE does not know manure from Shinola (an old shoe polish, some with a brown color).

 

[Skjorn]

M-Disk is potentially a decent option for long-term archiving, but a pretty poor choice for backups.

With 100GB max capacity per disk, Its capacity is 1/180th of LTO Ultrium-9's native (uncompressed) capacity and as little as 1/450th of LTO-9 Compressed capacity
So, if you've got a Petabyte of Grant-funded Research data to archive.. that's 10,000 m-disks vs. 56 LTO-9 tapes (fewer with compression).

But what about live, non-archival systems? Sure you can get WORM (write once, read many) LTO tapes when you want to ensure data integrity.. but LTO is mostly used for read/write workloads. If I've got 100TB of data w/ 5TB of modified or new data every month.. an M-Data system will just consume and consume and consume more media, which needs to be managed and purged eventually. LTO can get (and usually is) reused as old backup sets are aged out and overwritten and as file retention times come up. .. because we don't necessarily need every revision of a memo that was written 8, let alone 800 years ago.

And as to 30 years not being too durable.. how durable do you need your media to be?
If you have files/data sets that will need to be preserved for more than a few years.. that's pretty much the definition of an Archive.
Sure, use m-disk for archival data that needs a VERY long retention time.. and lock it away in a vault for future generations. But how much of the data generated by or collected by the Federal Government needs to be preserved that long? Mindlessly collecting data is actually a bad thing. If you just keep writing to disk after disk... tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of them??.. how do you find anything 40 years later?

You're talking about a solution for an entirely different problem than backups. A proper data archiving system should be independent of a backup solution and it's more than just Hardware and Media.. it requires a metadata standard, and markup of everything that's archived so it can be found at a later date.

One last point.. I'd also be a little concerned that M-Disk is basically a very robust DVD or BlueRay media and that the company invented it went bankrupt in Dec. 2016. There's only two companies that are licensed to produce the media too.
M-Disk seems like a dead end for a lot of reasons.. Sure there's a lot of BD drives around today.. but optical media has been dying-out for a while.. and there's no roadmap for continuing development of M-Disk specifically since it's developer went belly up. I assume that licensing that technology any further would also be.. complicated.. to say the least.

LTO, on the other hand, literally stands for "Linear Tape-Open". It's an open standard that anyone can adopt and major vendors like IBM, HP, and Quantum have LTO roadmaps out at least 5 more generations.

Edit: all my numbers are based on LTO-9 tech. Capacities should double when LTO-10 becomes available later this year.

Yknow I said the main problem is capacity right?

 

[VectorVortec]

Is tape a viable backup? I've seen E-discovery cases where $10 million and 14 months was needed to get the info off the tapes. Tape as a system backup might be okay, but in most use cases, tape is just wasting time and money, because the info on the tape is usually extremely hard and expensive to find.

 

[allanwind]

Tape is just awful. Any media that sits on shelves without you ever knowing if it is still readable AT ALL is not considered "backup" in my book.

I am not sure anyone likes tape. What's the alternative for, say, 1 EB archival storage that you required to retain for 10 or 20 years? It's 56k LTO-9 tapes which at ~$100/ea so $5.6M for the media. I am sure buying a container of tapes at a time will have volume discount. There are other costs, of course, like sufficient number of drives and they are expensive.

How long did it take them to convert 14k tapes? What was the cost? LTO is a digital medium so not sure what to make of the last part of their announcement.

 

[TheElder]

Do you think that that the Doge emblem looks exactly like the Nazi efficiency one in the cog shape a mere coincidence
Do you think Miller, Bannon , Musk - nazi salute stuff just a mere coincidence.
All Millers, Musk support of far right National parties around the world . Trump whining about Le Penn caught grifting EU funds

The hate against POC, all Trumps vindictive about Africans, Mexicans, Vances remarks . Proud Boys . Trump has discriminated against POC as a businessman , never retracted statements about Central park 5 .
Removing POC war heroes from DOD websites etc is a Trump/Elon directive

We all know what MAGA means

POC are not safe in The USA from your police - nearly everyday some POC is deprived of their rights or shot at by police - Nothing happens.

I stand by my claims - attacks on AOC , Jasmine Crockett, Obama from the based are open and well supported by many MAGA people

The fact is you have normalised it and it's very acceptable to you

No MAGA cared about the hate they are eating cats and dogs , they amplified it and spread more hate - You are part of the problem

My country has racist and hateful people I acknowledge that , I stand up to those people
I will stand here behind my comments . MAGA promotes hate and racism

That's exactly what you did, spew hate. Great role model.