[ Thanks to Paul Shread for this link. ]
The death of tape storage has been loudly proclaimed for what
seems like decades now. But a recent breakthrough in tape
management could breathe new life into the long-running technology
and change archiving and even long-term backup as we know it.The breakthrough is a technology called the Linear Tape File
System (LTFS), which was developed and then open sourced by IBM.
LTFS is a self-describing tape format that allows tapes to be
written in a common format so that they can be read anywhere
without any application other than the open source LTFS. It also
indexes tapes and makes them searchable so the files you need can
be retrieved much faster.