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!
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.
I use LTO for my 70TB of data. My rig is done on the cheap. I got an LTO 5 drive external off ebay for around 500. SAS card and a really old cheap HP desktop for about 50. Works perfectly, I have done a full system restore from backups and the tapes are cheap. Have had this system working for 5 years now.
In the future i plan to upgrade to LTO 7 when the drives become cheaper, but I have found it to be very reliable, great for making my backups and just so cool and fun to use.
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.
Where in the world are you finding a 14tb drive for that price that isn’t used. More like $370 minimum, more often ~$400 from what I’ve seen.
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.
Large companies still use tape for their large data sets. Tape has some useful advantages that make it worth it in very specific situations.
The first is when you have a lot of data - if you have several hundred of even thousands tapes (likely including duplicates!) then the quantity of data you have backed up is large enough the tapes are the cheapest.
The second - as hinted above - is duplicates. If you don’t want the data lost a tape is a good answer to have several copies. While a disk might be cheaper, they are fragile and computers are not designed to swap disks that often. Even USB which is designed for swapping isn’t that good: the connector will physically wear out a lot faster than you would expect making the costs much higher to manage this. Plus the labor to plug/unplug a lot of drives will get you.
Third, some tapes come in a write once form. If you have data that (often for legal reasons) you need to store such that it cannot be modified later then tape is often you best answer to ensure the data really wasn’t changed. (either by an executive hiding their tracks, or an attacker trying to put ransomware on you).
That said, for most reading this, a few disks in a NAS is better than about 98% of people have and if you have snapshots on the NAS probably good enough for everything (your only risk is fire or theft of the NAS - if you cannot live with this get a second NAS elsewhere, or a cloud backup), similar cost, and has enough other useful features that you want it anyway.
Does make you wonder who does use tape? Id assume big businesses just use cloud, so who is left that uses tape?
Depending on what cloud tier you are using they might use tape then (e.g. IBM Cloud Object Storage Deep Archive).
Don’t clouds mostly just rely on replication across zones though?
I would have thought tapes were just too slow to be useful in that environment.
I’ll read up on the IBM deep archive.
Many use just HDDs. The load delay is usually because they don’t want to spin up every disk just for one chunk of a file, so they collect jobs and schedule spin up and down times.
But there are dedicated services that indeed use tape.
I always assumed that’s why the cheaper longer term storage took so long to recover (having to physically retrieve copies, even if it’s automated), but I have no real knowledge on it. Interesting.
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…
I use LTO4 tapes.
- Bare LC drive eBay $~60. Pulled from a library so I had to switch the operation mode. Missing the bay door and kinda dinged up but worked.
- Celerity FC81en HBA card was $~30.
- 1.6TB tapes sold in packs of 5 around $11/tape. Probably can do better than that at higher volume.
Overall take: slow noisy writes but viable for cheap stable long-term storage.
Note: for each of the components above I set price alerts and waited. If in a hurry, maybe skip tape storage lol
A bit pricy for home use with 8-10k bucks…
No shit. I still have a 5090 still stuck in my throat. $8k for a tape drive, hell, I could have got two 5090s.
I didn’t look tbh, I just assumed it would be 1-2k. 8-10 is crazy.
Does kinda backup my point though :/
Can you just connect a regular drive using a USB SATA adapter or something?
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.
I have wondered about how to manage a 100 spool of DVDs as long term cold storage of the most important data. Would need some way of splitting the data up automatically and building a straightforward burning workflow, with redundancy incase a disk is destroyed, and a way to find a given file.
Seems like a lot of work for 400-ish Gb, but 1. Its very cheap, 2. Archival disks could last a lot longer in cold storage than anything else affordable, and 3. Anyone could recover it in the future because DVD drives have been manufactured by the billion and are still being put in some office PCs. 100gb blurays are also an option but that means sourcing a burner and at least a few drives capable of reading them to store alongside.
Edit: at first blush, plain files to make recouvery easier plus par2 files scattered across enough disks to be able to lose a whole disk or have many damaged disks seems like the right format. Some sort of index would need to be built and left on every/most disks or maybe printed on paper. Its mainly the workflow to do it that would be a PITA. Then maybe vacuum seal the spool with some moisture and oxygen absorbers and put in a lightproof container. Good for decades later? Maybe.
Yes, but not as an out of the box solution. Tape drives use standard sizes, and standard interfaces (often serial attached SCSI). You can buy a tape drive and a USB encloser that lets you put your own drive in it and the tape drive will work. You need to make sure the USB encloser provides enough power, is big enough, and has the correct interface, but it will “just work” if you select the right parts and plug them in. Do make sure you read the spec - some cheaper enclosers may not support USB3 data rates which you tape drive may need to work well.
The USB designers made the decision back in the day that they would not design a protocol for CDrom (then important), tape, or other such things. Instead they designed a “here is how to transmit SCSI over USB”, which makes it cheap to design USB to SCSI adapters and that is what has been done.
