Services · LTO Tape Vaulting
Offsite LTO Tape Vaulting in South Florida
Tape is still the only backup medium that is genuinely offline when it is not in the drive. That is not nostalgia — it is the entire reason tape survived the ransomware era while disk-to-disk did not.
Bring your retention schedule. We will tell you what it actually costs to meet it.
Air-gapped
No network connection. Ransomware cannot reach it.
70°F / 50%
Climate held to ±2° and ±5% RH
9R
Highest UL vault rating available
40+
Years operating since 1983
Why this matters
What it costs to do nothing
Tape rated for thirty years assumes 70°F and 50% relative humidity. A cartridge that spends a Florida summer in a server closet, or a weekend in a building whose chiller failed, has quietly lost most of that life. You will not find out until the restore, which is the worst possible moment to find out.
Why clients choose us for lto tape vaulting
- Media vault held at 70°F ±2° and 50% RH ±5%, continuously, not on a best-effort basis.
- Every LTO generation accepted, including legacy cartridges you can no longer read on site.
- Barcode scanning at every handoff, so a specific cartridge can be located by serial in seconds.
- Fully air-gapped — the vault has no network interface, so nothing in it can be reached remotely.
The practical answer
Most clients run a weekly full plus daily incrementals, with the weekly set rotating offsite and a monthly set held long-term. We will map your existing rotation rather than ask you to change it. Cartridge counts, not box counts, drive the price.
In practice
What this actually looks like
In practice tape vaulting is a labelling discipline more than a storage one. Cartridges arrive in a case with a pick list, each barcode is read against that list at intake, and what goes into the vault is a reconciled count rather than a box someone carried in. The cartridges sit upright, in their cases, at stable temperature and humidity. Nothing is opened and nothing is read. The value of the arrangement is that six months later the list still matches the shelf, which is the part that fails when tapes live in a cupboard.
The failure mode
How it fails when it fails
Tape fails quietly and it fails at restore time. The common causes are environmental rather than dramatic: heat and humidity cycling in an unconditioned room, cartridges stored flat under their own weight, or a set that was never verified after the drive that wrote it was replaced. The worst version is a rotation that has been running for years with nobody reading a tape back, so the first restore attempt is also the first test. A vault does not fix that — only a restore test does — but it removes the environmental half of the problem entirely.
Common questions
- Do you accept older LTO generations?
- Yes, all generations. Legacy cartridges are common — often they are the only copy of something an auditor will eventually ask for.
- How fast can we get a tape back?
- Scheduled rotations run daily, weekly, or monthly. Contracted clients get 24/7 emergency retrieval outside that schedule.
- Can you read or restore the tapes?
- No. We are a custodian of physical media. We do not have drives, we do not mount cartridges, and we never access contents.
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Serving South Florida
See the vault before you decide.
Tours are private and by appointment. You will see the vault door, the man-trap entry, and the box sizes in person. No account relationship is required to visit.