Suitability of Tape for long term Archive

Suitability of Tape for long term Archive

How suitable are modern LT04 / 5 tapes as a long term archive. I have found it hard to get current information on archiving tapes, in the OLD days, you had to refresh the data on a regular basis, along with the concerns about the conditions that tape was stored in.

Do you still need to do a refresh every couple of years, or can you just put the tape on the shelf and leave it sit for six years. This is not backup, this is Archive, so all the figures quoted about the tape life with number of complete tape writes etc are of no use, as the tape hopefully will get written once, verified once, then put away just incase someone needs to use the log data from 1781 to prove who did the crime.