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!
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?