[prirun]

Backblaze has done some cost comparisons between LTO and cloud storage:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/lto-versus-cloud-storage/

If you're interested, I'm doing experiments with another site with 500T to backup, where I added sampling and sharding to HashBackup (I'm the author).

Sampling allows you to do faster simulated backups to determine the best backup parameters to use. In his case, we determine that a very large block size - 64M - was the best way to backup his data.

Sharding automatically partitions the filesystem so multiple backup can run simultaneously to get backup speed in the 250-400 MB/s range.

It's more at the proof of concept stage, but having another large site to work with would be fantastic! A couple of the larger sites using HashBackup are EURAC (European Research Center) and HMDC (Harvard MIT Data Center)

[dmd]

Yeah, I read that Backblaze thing, and used their spreadsheet. Tape came out to be nearly 9x cheaper for us, given our large data set but extremely slow growth rate. Basically, we have a lot of data we need to protect from disaster, but it changes/gets added to very slowly, so capex (buy some tapes, put the data on tape, put the tapes in an offsite box and forget about them) is vastly cheaper than opex (pay by the month for hundreds of terabytes).