[andyjohnson0]

I'd be interested to know what tape setup you use? I occasionally look into using LTO tapes for home backup, but the media and hardware always seems a bit too expensive compared to something like Backblaze (which I currently use).

Also afaik tapes need a stable storage environment: how do you manage that?

[grepfru_it]

LTO5. The cost of my LTO5 system is the cost of downloading all of my data once from a remote cloud provider. It's a nobrainer

[linuxdude314]

As someone who used to admin a 30PB+ LTO library I love me some tape, but unfortunately it’s not that simple of a value proposition.

Bit rot is less of a thing with LTO, but still a thing.. I.e. you will at some point need to update your LTO system and it’s storage media.

The robot I owned was the library storage for movie frames at a major motion picture studio. We would upgrade every other release, so while I was there we were upgrading from LTO-5 to LTO—7.

The robot was big, and would write data to two redundant tapes. One copy would be sent to Iron Mountain, the other stayed in the robot.

Creating a backup like you are isn’t really protecting much if you don’t have a good facility to store the tapes in.

Part of the point of paying for a service like AWS Deep Glacier is that it’s an offsite backup.

An LTO backup has no advantage over a hard disk if your home catches on fire.

[grepfru_it]

Well I store two sets of offsite tapes. One at my colo site and one in a climate controlled storage facility. I rotate my tapes weekly and the inbound tapes get restored and compared against the disk backup.

I also ran IT departments for the last 30 years, so you probably shouldn’t use me as the scapegoat :)

[MenhirMike]

For tapes, LTO is really the only game in town, every other tape format is dead. You can get LTO-4 tape drives for dirt cheap because companies have been upgrading them. Yeah, they'll be used, but those drives are meant for heavy duty, and you can just pick up some spares. I found that IBM Fibre-Channel drives are available aplenty, cheap, and they usually come with a front bezel for installation into either two 5.25" slots or something like a Dell PowerVault 114X. (Unlike Library Drives that usually come naked and in non-standard form factors). A FibreChannel host adapter, some cables and transceivers, for probably less than $20 combined, and you're good to go. LTO-4 tapes hold 800 GB and are readily available new for affordable prices as well.

I did upgrade to an LTO-5 drive last year so so, after finding a new-in-box from a liquidation sale for something like $450. The nice thing about LTO is that it's 2 Generations R/W and 3 Generations Read - so the LTO-5 drive will Read/Write LTO-5 (1.5 TB) and LTO-4 tapes, and read LTO-3 tapes. I think with one of the new standards (LTO-8?) it's a bit more muddy, so check compatibility.

I think that LTO-4 and LTO-5 is the sweet spot for hobbyists: You still need to spend some money on a drive or two and buy brand new tapes, but it's reasonably affordable. That said, for a business, I'd just bite the bullet and buy a new drive. Dell sells an external SAS LTO-7 drive brand new for $3700 list price, but I think there might be cheaper options. Together with some tapes and a SAS Controller, I'd say that for $5000 you can get a decent, brand new setup.

I put the tapes in Turtle LTO Cases (https://turtlecase.com/products/lto-20-black), and they sit in a closet. It's not climate controlled or anything, but the place is roughly at a similar temperature year round. The tapes aren't THAT sensitive, but I'd definitely not store them in the garage where I might get a 50+ degree temperature difference throughout the year. That said, there are companies that offer off-site storage options with climate controlled environments. I haven't looked into their pricing since I didn't need it, but the nice thing about tapes is that you can just backup to two tapes and send the second tape off-site. LTO has built-in encryption support, so that's an option.

Twice a year or so, I run a restore of the tape and compare it to the SHA256 that I took while backing up the file (I did build myself some rudimentary cataloging system to SHA256 hash every file, then back it up to tape with tar, and make a record of what file with what SHA256 got backed up when on what tape). I've yet to encounter any bit rot/defective tape issues, but YMMV.

I do use Backblaze's B2 service as well for cold-ish storage. Though I only back up truly irreplaceable or inconvenient to recreate data into B2. That way, I have multiple copies of truly important stuff, I have stuff readily available where I am, and I have terabytes of stuff that isn't worth the expense for the cloud since I can re-create it, but nice to have a copy of.

Tape Drives may be overkill for many and external hard drives (plural!) might be a better option for many. What I like about tape drives is that the media isn't "hot". If I have ransomware running wild, connecting an external hard drive puts everything on it at risk (hence the need for multiple drives), whereas with a tape, it would have to specifically try to rewind the tape and start overwriting, and I would notice it. But YMMV, I never had a ransomware problem myself, but I do have stuff I really don't want to lose, so multiple backups of it in multiple ways (Daily .tar archive on a hard drive, backed up to tape, and backed up to the cloud) should hopefully give defense in depth and the ability to at least recover some older state.

[andyjohnson0]

Thank you, really, for taking the time to write all this: extremely informative. I think this will be my priority for Q1 next year.