It would be great if magnetic tape were more accessible for consumers. A while back I was reviewing local backup and storage options, and I read up a bit on it. I think it scales better when you have massive amounts of data, but the initial price is fairly steep.
At the consumer level it makes way more sense to buy HDDs. My suggestion would be to pick up something like the EasyStore 8TB external HDD [0] (on sale right now at Best Buy for $160, will probably drop again soon). You can open it up, extract the drive, and drop it into your computer if you want internal storage.
If you want to reduce the risk of data loss you can also fill one up with an encrypted snapshot of your important things and ship it to a family member. Very important if you live somewhere that's at risk of being destroyed by natural disasters.
I’ve been happy with M-Disk DVDs for durable, disaster-proof, write-once backups. Gets a little pricey when you start talking about TB, but for family photos and important documents it more than meets my needs.
I'm not familiar with M-Disks but I swore off optical media for long term storage around 2004 when the discs in the binder I use to carry around started turning up empty. Several of them were those Kodak Gold Archival CDRs that were supposed to last a decade but were dead inside 3 years.
Cloud backup eliminates local disaster data loss. Which is amazing. It also introduces counter party risk, e.g. Google style service shutdown with 30-90 days to download your data or even a Megaupload like shutdown.
Isn't that only a serious risk if you are using it as cloud storage as opposed to cloud backup? If you're using it for backup, your only risk is that you won't have a backup for some period of time during/after a shut-down, until you have uploaded your local copy to a new provider.
Last year I took a subscription to Backblaze, (incidentally) I have around 8TB of data, I have a gigabit upload (a real one), but Backblaze servers are on the other side of the planet for me. It took around 3 or 4 months to upload it all.
That's to say, there's more to it than upload speed, if Backlaze had servers in Europe I'd recommend it much more than I do.
The core data that I'd want to restore immediately if I lost my primary fileserver is only around 100GB or less
I have several TB's of other data (mostly photos, videos, etc) that I'm fine waiting for weeks or months for if needed, but if you're in a hurry, Backblaze will sell you a hard drive that they restore your backup to and mail it to you.
Then I'd need multiple hard drives for redundancy, and I have to bring them back and read them regularly to make sure the data is all readable. And while I have a large amount of data that I rarely touch, I have a small amount that changes frequently, so I need to include that data in my off-site backup too.
Or I could just sign up for a cloud backup service, spend a month or so uploading my initial snapshot of data, and then backups are automatic and always offsite, replicated, and scrubbed. For $10/month.
Most non tech savvy people don't even have that much data to backup: most of their heavy stuff (music, pictures, etc), are now attached to an online service.
Plus you only do it once. Differential backup would take down the size of the next backups to a few Gb, or even Mb.
It turns out that actual throughput on nominal "gigabit" consumer ISP connections ranges from 0-95% of the branding. It is only safe to consider them as "may burst as high as 980 Mb/s" and to actually test your connections to any given destination. Oversubscription and the resulting congestion are assumed into the consumer ISP model.
+ $400/yr for storage. A few hard drives, DVDs, and tapes are much cheaper and pretty easy (even if you have to pay $500 once to get an IT pro's help.)
HDD need regular replacements if you want them to work in 30 years. It's cheaper than 400$/year, but not as much as you might think especially if you want to ensure 3 copies of each piece of data.
Even assuming that a consumer "gigabit" connection is actually delivering that speed, you also have bottlenecks in the wire protocol (sftp or scp or https or whatever) and the storage service. It would take me longer than a day to copy 8T to the archive storage within my own data center using HSI (an ftp-like utility for accessing HPSS storage).
LTO5 is out of date, the prices you're seeing reflect there being a small but consistent demand for enterprise customers needing to purchase these to read LTO5,4 and 3 tapes and to replace failed out of warranty drives .
Raw capacity of LTO-8 is 12TB at $160, which is a much better value than LTO5
Factor in that these tapes are designed to be written to and then sit on a shelf for years and that such devices are more frequently purchased by enterprises expecting a long service life out of them (say 10+ years) the prices for the complete system do tend reflect this with a higher cost to entry.
> Factor in that these tapes are designed to be written to and then sit on a shelf for years
This is important. Your $47 consumer hard drive will likely not have that longevity, nor will your home computer 10 years hence likely have the correct interface and drivers to access it.
An IBM 3592 JD Advanced Data Tape Cartridge costs a bit over $200 and has a raw (uncompressed) storage capacity of 15TB. An LTO-8 cartridge is 12TB and under $200. Meanwhile the cheapest 10TB HDD Newegg sells is $304.27.
> In a cold and dry room you can have your tapes sit for 3 decades and they'll work.
If you can find a working drive, and drivers, for a 30 year old tape. Look at all the problems NASA has with their old tapes. The tapes actually are fine, it's just a major effort to custom build a machine to read them.
Oh don't worry, you'll get a drive and drivers, these things are build for it and as long as not all vendors for the standard are bankcrupt, you'll get something to read the drive.
You can still obtain LTO-1 compatible drives nearly 2 decades after the standard was released.
No idea. It seems to be sold under the "if you need to ask, you can't afford it" pricing model. These things are definitely not intended for home use; I don't think any tape drives being sold today are, really.
At the consumer level it makes way more sense to buy HDDs. My suggestion would be to pick up something like the EasyStore 8TB external HDD [0] (on sale right now at Best Buy for $160, will probably drop again soon). You can open it up, extract the drive, and drop it into your computer if you want internal storage.
If you want to reduce the risk of data loss you can also fill one up with an encrypted snapshot of your important things and ship it to a family member. Very important if you live somewhere that's at risk of being destroyed by natural disasters.
[0] https://www.bestbuy.com/site/wd-easystore-8tb-external-usb-3...