So…I was wondering. Is there any backup tape system that would be advisable to use for backing up some TBs? I guess I need it to be USB, as the server is a micro PC, one of those tiny ones you can hang from behind a monitor. It’s an HP ProDesk.
Thanks!
https://www.unitex.co.jp/en/products/hardware/lto/lto-tapedrive/
Found from a google, no experience with it.
Tape is not a nice medium for the self-hoster, the drives are expensive, the tapes need to be carefully stored securely (temperature and humidity controled). Its a lot of hassle. That said, if you find something good, I’m interested as well, so report back.
Where I live I have an interesting second hand market. I might be able to find something older like LTO5 at reasonable prices. I’m not sure however about the SAS to USB adapter…
One place to look at are web sites dealing with company bankruptcies. They are good for purchasing electronics and tools.
Back when windows and office licenses were bound to a sticker with a key number, I bought a stack of broken laptops for 10€. They were leftovers from an auction - nobody wanted them. I removed and tested RAM and harddisks, and then cut out the bottom of those laptops where the license stickers were. I sold each set of licenses, Windows and Office, for 10€ each, making a good profit. And kept the RAM and HDs that worked for my own use.
A bit pricy for home use with 8-10k bucks…
I didn’t look tbh, I just assumed it would be 1-2k. 8-10 is crazy.
Does kinda backup my point though :/
LTO tapes are 18TB today, raw - 48TB compressed.
How much data you got?
At that size I can probably build 2 Proxmox boxes with drives and compete very well on the costs.
A single 14TB disk is about $270 today - that’s in the same realm as a tape.
But tape also requires a drive, and that gets pricey fast.
It depends on the generation. Older tapes and drives are a lot cheaper, especially second hand but hold less (tapes aren’t meant to be overwritten a lot though so typically you want unused. New old stock or new).
Most homelabbers use LTO-6 or 5, and you can also upgrade your drive and still read your old tapes (except for the newest generations iirc)
I haven’t looked at a price comparison for years, so I’m going off pre AI numbers. It was cheaper then spinning rust back then for $/TB (for my setup it was cheaper than rust by a massive margin since it have a quarter petabyte of storage. Amortizing a tape drive over that many tapes gets cheap quickly), but maybe its different now?
Just use a spinning rust drive for periodic backup.
Nothing you have is worth the cost of a LTO setup.
This is the answer.
I haven’t done the math, but even SMB’s don’t use tape today.
They may do a local replica and then some kind of local-hardware-based cloud backup solution, because cost and capability.
Does make you wonder who does use tape? Id assume big businesses just use cloud, so who is left that uses tape?
Its fun to think of alternate storage media. The other day I calculated that with the idiotic pricing now, HDDs are only slightly cheaper than DVD storage. And DVDs last longer and dont crash randomly, especially if you get long storage dvds.
Couple years ago, I got three DOA WD red nas HDDs. Dead. And 2 DOA Samsung ssds. I have zero trust for any drive now. No doubt theyre all cost cutting and going to shit. I have 20 year old drives that still work fine.
Ive never personally experienced disc rot even on 20 year old discs, but I heard people have. But yeah DVDs would obviously be a goofy mass backup solution.
I just restored from some 20 year old dvds and they had visible yellowing at the edges and lost data at the end. A few videos were unrecouverable, not many.
Can you just connect a regular drive using a USB SATA adapter or something?
If the tape drive attaches with SATA like a regular DVD drive or HDD then just get an adapter that connects USB to SATA. USB is unlikely to be a bottleneck with how slow tape is anyway, so having it internal isn’t that important.
But tape drives are only worth it if you need a heck of a lot of cartridges or absolutely need 30 year storage rather than maybe 10 years for an offline physical hard drive (assuming they’re both stored properly). Though I have drives decades old that still have readable data. But even if you copy out the data every 5-10 years to a new HDD, you’re likely to spend less than just the tape drive itself. And drives get larger over time so you’ll need fewer of them whereas the tape drive will have a set maximum storage space. And what if the tape drive dies and the company is out of business? You may end up not being able to read your tapes. SATA on HHDs has continued backward compatibility for decades.
Anwyay, for a home user with a few hundred TB to store, I’d be surprised if the cost would be better for tape. It’s really useful for places that store a few hundred TB per day, though. That’s where tape can be a boon. The primary advantages are it takes up a lot less physical space per TB and lasts longer. And once you do get past the cost of the drives, it does eventually start to be cheaper.
Also, remember it’s way slower than a physical HDD much less an SSD. Even an HDD connected via USB.
I want to mention, bit rot is real. The data can be read, that doesn’t mean it hasn’t degraded. Tape has a much lower chance of the data just… changing.
Now, does it truly matter? It depends.
If you are truly worried that your precious photos are going to rot away, then it may be worth it to invest in tapes. Irreplaceable data is priceless, after all.
Yeah, but you can also use file level technology like par files for rar compressed files or file system level or hardware level tech that allows for repairing some level of corruption. This often uses a little more space depending on how much corruption you want it to be tolerant of, but again, unless you have a ton of data, even using 1.25x the space needed for the data itself might still be cost effective for most home users.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters NAS Network-Attached Storage SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SMB Server Message Block protocol for file and printer sharing; Windows-native SSD Solid State Drive mass storage ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.
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I think that isn’t really a thing. Usually you would have a tape drive in a backup server for a network, and the backup server would have its own HDD, so you’d back up over the network to the HDD and then dump HDD to tape locally at close to the transfer speed of the disk. Higher capacity tapes have fast transfer and if your data source can’t kee up, the tape has to start and stop all the time, which slows everything down and wears everything out.
“Some TB’s” = single digits? Probably just back up to remote storage if you have enough network speed.
Do you need tape? Do you really need that much data? Archival grade DVDs can store a few GB (an order of magnitude less than the TBs you asked for!), and probably easier to find/source.
