17h ago

Tape drive backups

Hey folks, being the family IT man I've held onto all of my families photos/videos over the last 20 years

I've been pretty careless with the backups and I know if I don't do anything it's only a matter of time before I lose them

Although I've never used them, tape drives seem to be the best so I thought I'd ask here if anyone uses them for their homelab?

It might be overkill for a few GB of photos but I'd also use the tape drives for data hoarding purposes so it's a win win in my book

31 comments

I have around 65TB backed up on LTO5 tapes. Found them very reliable when needed for a restore and great for an off-site backup.
However I would say it is overkill for anything under 20TB.
- How much did this system cost? I have an idea for a product and one of the key parts of it is having a huge amount of local storage. I would need like 10x what you have though.
  
  The lto 5 drives are around $400 on ebay and the tapes can be had for around $20 each - less if bought in bulk and each tape hold 1.5TB.
  I don't find it that slow as in the event of a restore like i am doing at the moment, I can get through around 3 tapes per 24 hours.
  One thing I will say is although newer LTO standards allow you to treat it like a normal drive it works better using proper software designed for the task like Iperius Backup.
- How have I never heard of tape drives for backup before? They seam like the ultimate medium for archival storage. Super cheap although very slow, sounds like a good compromise to me.
  
  because the cartridges are comparatively cheap, yes. but the drives are expensive--minimum $5k (average $8k) for a drive in my country.
  
  My folks had a tape backup system in the late 1990s. It used 250MB tapes.
  They've been around for decades.
tape drives seem to be the best
Tape drives are the keytars of the tech world. They seem cool and a pro can really jam with them... but they're not the most practical and you should really get a guitar or a keyboard until you know what you're doing.
Yeet your shit onto rsync.net or sth else simple and call it a day, unless you're in it for the meme.
- Tape drives are the keytars of the tech world. They seem cool and a pro can really jam with them… but they’re not the most practical and you should really get a guitar or a keyboard until you know what you’re doing.
  That made me snort. But you speak the truth. I have a Roland AX-Edge that I bought off a guy who thought it would be a good idea to play. I think he paid like $1200 for it and after the new wore off, he sold it to me for $400, basically brand new.
Hetzner Storage box is $20/month for 10tb.
Forget the tapes. This is hard to say but just pay for online storage. It's $9.99 a month for 2TB from Google and Apple. Your data will be safe and accessable by family if something happens to you. You could also get a cheap NAS like device like this https://a.co/d/dgsnQbr and maybe every couple of months you create a offline backup onto another device.
- In this vein, Backblaze Personal unlimited account would be well worth it to me. $8.25 USD ($99/year contract) for unlimited backups. The downside to Backblaze is if you're pushing large volumes of data, like above 5 TB, it is excruciatingly slow doing a restore online. Luckily, they will sell/rent you a 10 TB drive with your data, shipped to you. After you make the restore/transfer, you can decide to send the drive back for a full refund, or keep it.
- @BigTrout75 @Squiddork and ffs print out some instructions on how to access it all. And tell someone where you've put that.
  Consider using a decent password manager and you'll only need to let your loved ones know how to get into that.
a few GB of photos
get an m-disc burner and make multiple full backups to distribute around your family
- Yep.
  Absolutely the best advice.
  I always recommend the same:
  Get a secure proper cloud storage (Backblaze, Hetzner Object Storage/Storage box, Ionos,etc.) for daily/incremental backups and single file recovery. (As Tandberg is no longer an alternative this seems to be the only choice atm). Make sure you have encryption on and a proper rotation/deletion schedule.
  Get an external harddrive for a full backup every few weeks/months, preferably store it offsite, even better if you get two and rotate them offsite.
  Get a M-DISC Burner for the important files. Burn them onto BlueRay M Discs and store these at various offsite locations as well. Do so every few months. These have the advantage of being WORM (write once, read many).
  Tapes are fucking expensive for current models and the old LTO drives one can get off Ebay,etc. tend to write faulty data and are almost always end of life. And as LTO is not backwards compatible beyond the generation below it's very much a possibility that people will have issues reading their tapes in 5 or 10 years.
Backblaze r2 is $6/tb/mo first 10gb are free
- +1 for Backblaze. They have a convenient backup software too that works great. I backup my parents laptop using it, and use their S3 storage for my NAS backups.
My advice is avoid tape backups. The cost, risk of media degredation, and management overhead make them not worth it, especially for a homelab.
Also, restoring an entire VM is almost easier than recovering a single file, just because of the sequential nature of reading data from a tape. Data recoveries are pretty slow in general.
I backup to an external hard drive with regular copies to iDrive S3. Been doing it that way for a number of years with no problems.
- I've been using tape libraries since the early 2000's and I agree I wouldn't be bothered to have to deal with them in my homelab. Just having to manage rotations and so on... uuuugh no thanks.
The good ones... Are not cheap (if someone knows a cheap option though, I'd be happy to add it to my own repertoire!)
For me, I backup with:
A second NAS
a clone to a NAS at two other homes (family), which also sync to mine
Encrypted backups to generic cloud storage
Edited to add:
You dont need to backup everything.
What is being backed up by me at all the locations above:
Content I can't replace (home photos, movies, etc)
Configs for services
Personal documents and other such data.
etc
Aside from the home movies, its not a huge amount of data. Lots of VHS conversions of graduations, Christmases, etc of long past.
Locally I back up more to the second NAS including:
Content I can replace but this is faster
Full backups of VMs
LXC snapshots
etc
So while I have a huge amount of storage at home, what's needed elsewhere is not anywhere near as much.
Tape drives will be expensive and likely beyond overkill for this. I'd recommend you grab a blue ray DVD writer and use that instead. The discs are generally shelf stable for 25 years and hold about 50-128GB depending on the disc. Duplicates are cheap, storage is relatively easy, and it doesn't require constant upkeep/power like a hard drive would. Downsides? They just stopped making the discs, so they'll grow in cost over time. That's about it that I can think of.
- Sony stopped making recordable Blu-ray media. Other companies such as Panasonic and Verbatim are still in production.
  
  If your purpose is long term archival you should probably be using M-Disc Blu-rays anyway, which are still actively made by Verbatim (and one other company).
DVDs are the same idea but easier
Why do tape drives seen to be best? What's your use case? They're still used in enterprise environments because they're insanely dense compared to hard disks, and it's real easy to load a truck with a few petabytes to ship elsewhere. Is that what you need? Density? Seems like not for just a few gigs.
If you want backups you need to ship your media, tapes or otherwise, off-site.
Pop your files into a cloud service and call it done. If you're looking for long term archives and don't want to use other people's computers, burn some DVDs and store them at someone else's house.
There are 24tb hard drives now.
Tape is unfortunately uneconomical for regular people due to the drives costing so much, unless you get a used, older generation one.
How many GB's do you mean? Maybe try some optical discs, BD-R at 25GB maybe.
Otherwise just rent some online storage. Hetzner Storage Box is cheap and Storage Share is only slightly less cheap, and has lots of sharing features (it's really NextCloud).
- If they're considering optical media, typical BD-R, while viable, may not be be the best choice. BD-R M-Discs would probably be a better choice for backups. Especially if they're planning on needing access to the data over a period of decades, which would be potentially useful for familiy photos/videos and critical documents.
  They are more expensive, as is the drive needed for them, but not by enough to be out of reach or even unreasonable given the additional durability of the discs.
Tapes can have long term issues in storage, as the tape reel winds will eventually start to bleed over magnetic signals from one wind to the next.
In analog world, they call it tape hiss. In digital world, with good error correction, it can last a long time, but is still ultimately prone to data corruption, eventually..
I recommend a video surveillance rated multi terabyte hard drive, they're designed to run 24/7. I have two 4TB Seagate Skyhawks.
- LTO tape is good for 30 years when properly stored. You should be transferring the data to a newer format much sooner than that anyways. LTO drives are only backwards compatible for 1 or 2 versions, so you probably won't be able to find a working drive that can read your tape 30 years later.

31 comments