|
Yes, the tape drive is something I am very happy that I ended up doing. I have two LTO-6 tape drives. They only connect via SAS, which is a little annoying, but I bought a 2-port used SAS card on ebay for $20. I ended up buying a pack of like 100 LTO-6 tapes on eBay two years ago for a steal, like $150 in total. Each tape is 2.5TB, so I can pretty easily back up my movies. Each movies is written to two separate tapes. I keep a spreadsheet of which tape every movie lives, in case I need to restore a specific backup. I would really like to get an LTO-7 or LTO-8 drive with Thunderbolt, but they cost an arm and a leg even used on eBay right now. If you get lucky, an external SAS LTO-6 drive can be had for about $200-$300. It's a slightly expensive up-front cost I'll admit, however, it came after I was using Google archive storage, and when I did a restore of 21TB of movies, the next day I had a bill for like $700! It's saved my ass one time thus far; I accidentally broke my ZFS RAID and lost everything, but fortunately I was able to restore all my blu-ray rips from tape, and it was pretty easy, and more importantly, didn't cost me anything extra. If you decide to go down this road, I do recommend getting one that has support for LTFS; otherwise you're going to be stuck using tar commands I think. |