Offloading petabyte-scale legacy tape data to cloud cold tiers without network sync?
We're currently auditing our long-term archiving costs and looking for some architectural advice. Right now, we have about 4 PB of compliance data sitting on physical, aging magnetic tapes on-prem. It's deep cold storage, so reads are practically zero, but keeping the old hardware alive is getting expensive.
Moving all this to Azure Archive or AWS Glacier Deep Archive seems like the obvious choice for the long run. The catch is our local bandwidth. Trying to stream petabytes over our current pipe would drag down production for months.
Because a network migration is out of the question, I've been looking into physical mass-ingest alternatives. I was checking out how specialized operations like Tape Ark or physical bulk-ingest pipelines handle reading legacy media formats and uploading them directly to cloud buckets.
Has anyone used this kind of offline approach to completely decommission their on-prem tape setups? If you did it at this scale, did you hit any hidden formatting or index compilation issues once the data reached the cloud?