On 24 November 2017 at 13:06, Nelson H. F. Beebe <beebe@math.utah.edu> wrote:

P.S. In 1990, we filled a dumpster with 9-track tapes that we had to
abandon because of our move to new hardware that lacked such a drive,
and because our new disk system had insufficent disk space to preserve
their contents.

I have since regretted that decision many times, because a lot of
stuff was lost forever.

The maximum capacity of 6250-bpi 9-track tapes was about 100MB to
170MB. A thousand such tapes would have needed just 100GB to 170GB,
an amount of space that I can now buy in Utah for about US$4 (based on
a local store offering of $94 for a 4TB USB-3 attached disk about the
size of a paperback thriller).

Sure, but how much would 170GB of storage have cost in 1990? And what would have been the cost to mirror it, or to back it up on to a more modern tape format? Was that data really worth tens of thousands of dollars?

-Henry