I work for a large hospital. I have been asked to investigate possible configurations for archiving something between a few hundred terabytes and a petabyte of data for 25 years. This would be clinical records that we need to keep in case of a malpractice suit. The retention period is 25 years because there are two ways we can get sued for alleged malpractice involving a pediatric patient. The parents or guardians have a seven year window of opportunity to file suit, starting at the time of the alleged malpractice. The patient has a seven year window of opportunity, starting at his or her 18th birthday. In principle, the retention period should vary depending on patient age, but nobody I have talked to so far thinks it is practical to sort records in this way; they want a uniform retention period that covers the worst case scenario (a patient allegedly harmed as a newborn suing just before the end of his or her seven year window).
As far as I can tell, the most expensive part of such a configuration is the media, and LTO media will cost about a third as much as the most economical MagStar media (extended length 3592 volumes read and written with TS1130 drives). With the sort of workload described above I don't expect any difficulty staying within the recommended limit on the number of times an LTO volume passes over the tape heads. Are there any other reasons to be nervous about using LTO for long term archives?
