[myrryr]

This is going to sound pretty damn weird, but the last couple of places where I though tape backups would have been the right plan, we had people who saw the tape industry as a bit untrustworthy. Not the tapes, but the industry.

It took me a while to find out why, but the whole tape storage size not being their actual size has left a long shadow.

It is amazing that something so small can leave such a large bad taste in people's mouths for so long.

[dabiged]

I think a lot of people have also been burned by the continuous new rollout of tape formats.

People invest in tape because it offers long term offsite storage, but vendors only offer drive life spans in the order of 4-6 years. After this they rollout higher capacity drives/cartridges and force everyone to refresh their entire hardware and tape collection because they end of life equipment. This costs millions of dollars for a medium sized enterprise.

LTO5 was released in 2010. It offers all the feature of a LTO9 tape (encryption, compression, RFID chips, partitioning, LTFS support) only with much less space per cartridge. These LTO5 cartridges are still readable with very low error rates regardless of how they were stored 13 years later, but sourcing drives is getting more difficult every year.

Tape media needs the equivalent of an LTS Operating System release, where a vendor will guarantee the drives, libraries and cartridge formats will be manufactured, supported and maintained for 20+ years.

[jasomill]

LTO5 drives are readily available on eBay; units designed for tape libraries frequently sell for $100 or less and are easy to convert for external use.

Specifically, I've converted library drives from IBM and Quantum libraries, both with IBM mechanisms. Drives from IBM libraries are a bit easier to convert, but Quantum units have a smaller footprint.

In either case, once you disconnect the proprietary library power/control PCB, the drive and chassis fan can be connected to a standard PC power supply using off-the-shelf molex cables; I/O is standard Fibre Channel.

For IBM library drives, this is all that's necessary; the Quantum library drives I've converted require a firmware setting change to enable the FC interface on power up:

https://github.com/AC7RNsphnHVbyT4/ibm-tape-drive-automatic-...

TL;DR:

(1) Connect RS-422 USB adapter to a computer and the drive (N.B.: Wire colors from the article are not standardized; you can easily find the correct pinout by tracing the signals from the serial transceiver IC on the library interface PCB to the drive interface cable).

(2) Power up the drive.

(3) Send the byte string from the bottom of the drive until the drive reboots.

At this point, the FC interface should activate on power up as with any other standalone drive.

Finally, IBM supplies a useful diagnostic tool to ensure tapes and drives are in good working order (free IBM account required for download):

https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/ibm-tape-diagnostic-tool-i...

[dabiged]

All of what you have said is correct.

None of what you have said is going to happen at a bank, insurance company or media shop who need to comply with all the corporate legislation post-Enron.

[throw0101a]

> People invest in tape because it offers long term offsite storage, but vendors only offer drive life spans in the order of 4-6 years.

The exact same thing can be said of other storage technologies (HDD, SSD, etc).

Do you know why they do it? Because more bits keep getting created and no one is throwing away the previous bits, so they just keeping stacking up on each other.

[dabiged]

SATA was released in 2000. You can still buy new drives or motherboards with connectors. NTFS was released in 1993. You can still use it with off the shelf operating systems.

If I have an NTFS formatted SATA drive from 2002 I can plug it into a brand new machine and it will work out of the box (except it won't because it would have been dropped)

LTO6 was released in 2013 and is end of life. I cannot buy a new drive to read it. Storagetek T10000D was released in 2013. It is near impossible to find drives to read them. IBM TS1140 was released in 2014. Again all the tape hardware is EOL.

My point was: why is it that a media designed for long term storage, doesn't have long term support. If you want more uptake of tape, support the hardware for as long as you claim the tapes last.

[saiya-jin]

I guess most regulations require storage of data for 5 years, at least in banking that's the common case. So you can literally throw with added step of destruction at the end of supported life.

Lifetime of say 9 guaranteed supported years is useless in such model, no added value over 5. If 10 year ones cost 2x the 5-year ones they are still worse deal for company (with added cycle of safe erase to reuse).

Also, "very low error rates" sounds pretty bad - if I need to get back some client documents 95% success rate is abysmal and unacceptable, even 99% is NOK for most use cases. Unless you mean some self-correcting ones, but then we still have 100% reliability.

[chongli]

if I need to get back some client documents 95% success rate is abysmal and unacceptable, even 99% is NOK for most use cases

Parchives [1] solved this problem a long time ago.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive

[rbanffy]

> but vendors only offer drive life spans in the order of 4-6 years.

You should read and transcribe tapes from time to time anyway. I would be scared if I saw a vital tape that hasn't been read in 13 years.

[jl6]

On the other hand, the weak commitment to backward compatibility enables new drive/tape technology to move forward. It’s a good thing that we have LTO9 densities.

LTO drives have two generations of backward read compatibility, and LTO7 drives are readily available, so those 13-year-old LTO5 tapes aren’t stranded yet.

13+ years is pretty good when most enterprise equipment gets depreciated after ~7 years.

[nohankyou]

Unpredictable compression ratios weren't as much of a concern for me as physical failure. The bad taste was from having to unspool an entire backup tape onto the floor with a hand drill to get the tape reader operable again. All of this just so I can load another tape from the previous week to attempt a moonshot at restoring services before everyone wakes up.

You can test your restores all you want, but in an emergency, there is a chance it's going to jam up like a printer and destroy your backup at the same time.

[myrryr]

> Unpredictable compression ratios weren't as much of a concern for me as physical failure.

totally. I just think that their quirk in how they advertise has pushed people away from using them at all is interesting.

As one guy said, "I can compress stuff on my disks as well, it doesn't mean that they have twice as much capacity, and shouldn't be advertised as such"

I thought people would have just kinda shrugged their shoulders and just went "I guess it is just a little weird" but it really has pushed people away.

[leptons]

If you think one tape backup for important stuff is enough, then you did it wrong. Backups for your backups for your backups, is the way.

[ggm]

Wound a 9600 bpi on backwards (twisted tape) by mistake and was made to fix it. That was an interesting day.

[RecycledEle]

Tape companies are lying scum.