The US government task force known as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) claims it has saved $1 million by switching away from storing data on tape. But experts say that the move is difficult to understand, will likely save no money, and will put data more at risk.
Since President Donald Trump鈥檚 inauguration, DOGE, headed by billionaire Elon Musk, has slashed government budgets across the board. NASA was made to cancel projects, vital climate change data has disappeared from NOAA websites, and hasty replacements for decades-old computer systems have concerned security experts.
Now, DOGE has announced that the US General Services Administration had 鈥渏ust saved $1M per year by converting 14,000 magnetic tapes (70 yr old technology for information storage) to permanent modern digital records鈥�.
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Both the Executive Office of the President of the United States and the GSA failed to respond to 快猫短视频鈥檚 requests for more details about the nature of the data and the overall cost of the project from which the savings were made. But experts warned that the switch could actually both increase costs and reduce data security.
at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia says he鈥檚 sceptical that transitioning from tape to more modern storage methods could save money in either the short or the long term. There are high transition costs, he says, and the possibility of unforeseen problems or accidents 鈥渓urking in the dark鈥� that could add costs, harm data or both. And Di Pietro, who is an experienced consultant as well as an academic, says that the 鈥渢otal cost of ownership鈥� 鈥� the budget required to store data in the long term 鈥� could be higher too. A thorough investigation into total cost of ownership would be 鈥渂oring, basic stuff鈥� that should happen before any change like this in the federal government, says Di Pietro.
Tape is still widely used in business, government and scientific organisations because of its unrivalled ability to store vast amounts of data both cheaply and safely. 鈥淭ape storage continues to play a role in data protection, particularly for infrequently accessed yet essential data. The organisations that prefer tape typically do so because of its low price per gigabyte, low total cost of ownership, including very low power and cooling costs, and due to it being truly offline, which makes it secure against ransomware and data corruption,鈥� says at Hewlett Packard Enterprise in California.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), for instance, creates petabytes of data with each experiment and, although it is initially stored on hard discs for analysis, it is later moved to tape storage to free up hard discs for fresh experiments. Despite being the most expensive scientific instrument ever built, it uses tape because it is a cost-effective and reliable format. Redundant copies of data can be made and stored at locations around worldwide, where they can last for decades if correctly stored.
Hard discs 鈥� whether mechanical or solid state 鈥� may provide a faster way to retrieve data, but they also need to be replaced every three to five years, which adds to their cost. Di Pietro says that data slowly corrupts over time and that any large amount of data stored on a hard disc essentially becomes irretrievable after around seven years.
鈥淚f the savings were $1 million in a project costing a few million dollars, go for it,鈥� says Di Pietro. 鈥淚f the savings were $1 million in a project costing $1 billion, nobody in their right [mind] would go for it.鈥�
Di Pietro points out that tape is also not as sluggish a data storage tool as you may expect, given that modern installations have racks of tapes and advanced robots that can recall a tape on command and plug it into one of several read/write devices, meaning that data can be accessed even remotely.
at data storage company Quantum in Massachusetts says that institutions may move away from tape because of perceived ease of access or pressure for modernisation, but that it can be unwise.
鈥淭ape is not obsolete,鈥� says Sherbak. 鈥淚n fact, it remains one of the most reliable and cost-effective storage technologies for long-term data preservation, especially in research and scientific computing environments. Disc-based systems require constant power and cooling, leading to higher energy and maintenance costs. Cloud storage, while convenient, involves unpredictable and escalating retrieval fees.鈥�
Sherbak says that tape also offers strong security advantages. 鈥淎s an offline [air-gapped] medium, it is inherently protected against ransomware and other cyber threats that target online or network-connected systems. For research institutions managing irreplaceable or sensitive data, this level of protection is critical,鈥� he says.
