Hey folks, being the family IT man I’ve held onto all of my families photos/videos over the last 20 years
I’ve been pretty careless with the backups and I know if I don’t do anything it’s only a matter of time before I lose them
Although I’ve never used them, tape drives seem to be the best so I thought I’d ask here if anyone uses them for their homelab?
It might be overkill for a few GB of photos but I’d also use the tape drives for data hoarding purposes so it’s a win win in my book
I have around 65TB backed up on LTO5 tapes. Found them very reliable when needed for a restore and great for an off-site backup.
However I would say it is overkill for anything under 20TB.
How much did this system cost? I have an idea for a product and one of the key parts of it is having a huge amount of local storage. I would need like 10x what you have though.
Don’t buy lto5. Lto6 is the sweet spot right now.
I can buy lto6 drives on ebay for 250ish. Tapes are like 15-25 bucks each.
The lto 5 drives are around $400 on ebay and the tapes can be had for around $20 each - less if bought in bulk and each tape hold 1.5TB.
I don’t find it that slow as in the event of a restore like i am doing at the moment, I can get through around 3 tapes per 24 hours.
One thing I will say is although newer LTO standards allow you to treat it like a normal drive it works better using proper software designed for the task like Iperius Backup.
If you have a bigger budget around $2k something like LTO7 with 6TB tapes would be fantastic for larger data sets.
How much do those tapes cost if purchased in bulk? I am trying to figure out how much a petabyte storage system costs, and how much physical space this would take up, and how much electricity it would require to run. I had a lot of trouble finding this information on Google because I know so little about tape storage and don’t know what all I would need. I am probably not going to actually do anything with this but I am curious because I had this idea for a product and can’t get it out of my mind. The most important part (for the hardware portion) is having nearly a petabyte of physical, local storage. I am aware this would be quite expensive and relatively large, but the product would be intended for governments and companies not individuals.
How have I never heard of tape drives for backup before? They seam like the ultimate medium for archival storage. Super cheap although very slow, sounds like a good compromise to me.
because the cartridges are comparatively cheap, yes. but the drives are expensive–minimum $5k (average $8k) for a drive in my country.
Ook, maybe if I ever need to store a petabyte or two for whatever reason.
My folks had a tape backup system in the late 1990s. It used 250MB tapes.
They’ve been around for decades.
It’s only used in enterprise settings
It’s all we had in the early 90s for archiving :)