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[–] 2 pts

I don't have to imagine. Tape is still a great method of archival storage and backup. It's inexpensive, takes up little space and doesn't require power when stored. It can easily be mailed to other locations which gives it extremely high bandwidth. Sending a 580 TB tape overnight to another city easily beats even the highest network speeds we have today. Send a dozen tapes and you've saved a significant amount of time transferring data and have little chance of the data being corrupted or having missing bits due to network issues. Magnetic tape is still the king of the backup world and Fujifilm has just ensured it will remain king for a long time to come.

[–] 0 pt

I can agree with that, but what in the hell are you sending that requires 580 TB? I mean, holy shit.

[–] 1 pt

An easy scenario requiring a large set of data to be shared is science and medical. Do you have any idea how much data the Large Hadron Collider produces in a single run of the ATLAS or CMS experiments? If CERN needs to share its data with another lab or facility for analysis or certification, tapes would be an ideal method of transfer. Even smaller organizations can have massive amounts of data they need to share with partners or customers and tape makes the most sense again. If you need to perform disaster recovery for your company at a remote data center or colocation facility, tapes make moving all your data easy and you can send them by any physical delivery method with excellent chances of it making it to the facility intact. Home users don't need this level of storage, but a tape system that backs up a terabyte or two would be great for media collections and offline internet archives for home players. Tape isn't bad at all.

[–] 0 pt

The real answer to the question "who needs 580 TB FedExed to them overnight?" is: nobody