Tape with LTFS has several advantages over the other external storage devices it would typically be compared to. First, tape has been designed from Day 1 to be an offline device and to sit on a shelf. An LTFS-formatted LTO-6 tape can store 2.5 TB of uncompressed data and almost 6 TB with compression. That means many data centers could fit their entire data set into a small FedEx box. With LTFS the sending and receiving data centers no longer need to be running the same application to access the data on the tape.
