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by grepfru_it 912 days ago
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
1 comments

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.

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 :)