What seems at first like a logical move to modernize the government's archives may in fact be an ill-advised decision.

Elon Musk's organization aims to save $1 million annually by converting government records to digital formats. That switch ...

Magnetic storage is quickly becoming an antiquated ... they’re the antithesis of solid state drives (SSDs) because tape drives are slow to retrieve data but capable of holding a lot inexpensively.

Half a century later, magnetic tape remains surprisingly well-used in government. NASA uses it to back up vast amounts of data recorded by its satellites. The IRS stores lots of its taxpayer records ...

US GSA has decommissioned 14,000 tapes and an unknown amount of tape drives The data was moved to a new, unknown media platform that appears to have WORM capabilities US GSA claims to save $1M per ...

Though we have fingernail-sized micro-SD cards that can store 1TB now and consumer SSDs that can transfer data at over 14 MB/s, older magnetic storage media like HDDs and tape remain on the menu.

In February 2025, Musk criticized a federal contract with Iron Mountain to store physical records, labeling it a "time warp" ...

A sequential storage medium used for data collection, backup and archiving. The first electronic storage medium, magnetic tape is made of flexible plastic with one side coated with a ferromagnetic ...

President Trump's DOGE team, headed by Elon Musk, claims to have saved $1 million by ditching 70-year-old tape data storage.

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 ...