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!
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
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can you just connect a regular drive using a USB SATA adapter or something?
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.
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.
M-Discs are also useful as very long term archival storage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
In 2022, the NIST Interagency Report NIST IR 8387[25] listed the M-Disc as an acceptable archival format rated for 100+ years, citing the aforementioned 2009 and 2012 tests by the US Department of Defense and French National Laboratory of Metrology and Testing as sources.
