Tape Drives

OJ
I hoped to get some personal experience instead of goggled links.
I misread your question, sorry. :) My link is not even for legacy drives since IBM tape tech is very current.
 
Personally? At home?

I still have two Exabyte 8mm tapes (one 2.5gig, one 5gig), and one Digital cartridge drive (I think it is called TK-something). All connected via 50-pin SCSI. I think all the TK cartridges were copied to disk about 10 years ago. The last time I turned on the Exabyte was perhaps 5 years ago, to read one tape; took all afternoon, but eventually worked. I don't even remember what machine I used for this; probably not *BSD, since I've never had BSD on a machine with a slot for a SCSI controller. Most likely it was some Linux flavor.

I know that there are about 50 or 100 8mm tapes at home that have not been copied to disk yet, but I very much doubt that they will ever be read, because they are not backups of file systems; they are scientific data from a long-ago experiment, which will never be re-analyzed again.

Professionally? I've worked for large computer companies for the last 25 years all so. All of them use tapes heavily, some of them even build tapes. Matter-of-fact, quite a few of the folks at IBM research who do the R&D on tape heads are friends of mine; I used to work one hallway down the building from them. About 10 years ago, I got a patent for a bizarre little improvement in tape technology, working with another person from the same department that does tape head R&D.

In spite of rumors to the contrary, tape is NOT dead. It may be shrinking, and it might die in 10 or 100 years. Or perhaps 1000.
 
For what reasons are you still running legacy tape drives?
What product/interface/media have survived?
I am running LTO6 drives in a Dell TL4000 (IBM TS3200) 48-slot library*. I have 384TB of disk here** (only about 1/3 full) and even with multiple GigE Intenet connections, cloud is not an option (for both speed and cost) and a robotic library will load the next tape unattended, while swapping drives would be a manual process and much more expensive.

* See RAIDzilla 2.5 - Replication and backups
** At home. Really
 
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