I read this and it made me think of oh-so-many discussions while working on the DCS…

Tapes need to be cycled every few years in order to reliably retain data.

This is why NASA is having difficulty holding on to data… by the time a dataset is archived, it needs to be transferred to a new tape!

In other news, sometimes writing design documents is fun, other times it isn’t…. This is one of those “isn’t” times… :)