> ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.tape.network/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Tapes Every byte stored on Tapedrive lives in a tape. A tape is a prepaid reservation: an amount of space, for a length of time measured in epochs. You pay once, in TAPE tokens, and that's the whole storage bill. If you're coming from S3, a tape will feel bucket-like. It's the container your files go into, and the S3 gateway builds real buckets on top: a bucket is a tape. The details live in the [S3 gateway docs](/tools/s3-gateway). A tape drawn as a rectangle with capacity on one axis and lifetime in epochs on the other, containing tracks. Extending grows the rectangle along either axis. ## Reserving a tape Pick a capacity and a duration, pay once. The cost is the network's current storage price × capacity × epochs, and node operators set that price by vote. [Token economics](/protocol/architecture/token-economics) covers where the payment goes. The default price works out to about 1 TAPE per tebibyte per epoch, and the live price can move, so price a reservation against current chain state rather than a fixed number. There is no subscription behind any of this. No account to top up, no monthly bill, no per-request charges. The reservation is the entire storage cost, and the protocol charges nothing to read data back. Read service comes from [gateways](/protocol/architecture/gateways). The [quickstart](/sdks/quickstart) walks through the actual reserve call. ## One tape, one key Every tape is controlled by a single keypair, the TapeKey, generated when you reserve. Its public key is the tape's address, and whoever holds the private key owns the tape. That's the entire ownership model. The chain keeps no list of which tapes belong to which wallet. Lose a TapeKey and you lose control of that tape, and nothing in your wallet balance will remind you it exists. Store TapeKeys with the same care as the data they protect. The SDK and CLI both include helpers for this. ## Delegation A tape's owner can name a delegate: a second key allowed to register, certify, and delete tracks on the tape without owning it. You can revoke the delegate at any time. This is how a hosted S3 gateway writes to your tape without ever holding your TapeKey. You delegate to the gateway's key, and every S3 upload lands on a tape you still own. See the [S3 gateway docs](/tools/s3-gateway). ## What a tape holds A tape holds up to 65,536 tracks, the unit of raw data on Tapedrive, covered on the [tracks page](/protocol/architecture/tracks). All of them are committed into a single Merkle tree, so the chain stores one small commitment per tape while every individual track stays provable against it. Capacity is accounted as you go: used space goes up on writes, comes back down on deletes, and never exceeds what you reserved. The tape itself is bookkeeping. What lands on storage nodes are erasure-coded slices of your tracks, spread across a [spool group](/protocol/architecture/spool-groups). The tape is the on-chain record those slices must add up to. ## Lifecycle After reservation, a tape supports two operations: * **Extend**: add capacity or add epochs. One instruction covers both, and it's permissionless: anyone can pay to extend a tape, not only its owner. (`tape extend` and `tape resize` in the CLI.) * **Delegate / revoke**: grant or remove the write delegate described above. (In the SDK: [managing tapes](/sdks/writing#managing-tapes).) When a tape's time runs out, its data is deleted. Permissionless extension is the way around that hard rule: keeping data alive doesn't require the original owner. A service, a DAO, or anyone who cares about the data can fund an extension, no keys involved. Expiry deletes data. If you're storing anything you want to keep, watch your expiry epochs and extend in time, or arrange for someone who will. ## Tapes beyond user data The tape is the network's universal container. The protocol keeps its own records (epoch snapshots, history, blacklists) on system tapes that work exactly like yours. ## Tape vs TAPE Two things share the name: **a tape** is a storage reservation. **TAPE** is the SPL token that pays for it.