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.
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 :/
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
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.
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.
Just use a spinning rust drive for periodic backup.
Nothing you have is worth the cost of a LTO setup.
Can you just connect a regular drive using a USB SATA adapter or something?
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.
