While working in sports broadcast television 10 years ago, we had a little more than 2 petabytes of storage but the drives filled an entire 42U cabinet (72" tall). We cycled that amount of data about every month. Everything was archived to two sets of tape for offsite storage. When the Fukushima earthquake occurred, some smart people in my company immediately purchased every bit of tape we could get our hands on because all the tape came from Japan and it was essential for our business.