tape backups in 2024

decuser

decuser

I'm curious if anyone outside of a sysadmin role use tape anymore for backups. I'm up for trying to figure it out if it's somehow advisable. I don't know much about tapes beyond their physical characteristics, and even that's pretty sketchy.

Questions:

1. Do you use tape for home use backup? If so what's your setup?
2. How much is it gonna cost me for a reliable but budget friendly setup?
3. What is a setup - a tape drive and tapes or is there more to it?
4. Internal or external?
 
I have LTO4. SAS internal in a 5.25" bay. I'm not sure how much that costs these days.

I didn't find a satisfactory software for spanning multiple tapes, so for now it is used to update individual high-value directories.

Robustness seems good to me. No failures yet.
 
cracauer@ said:
I have LTO4. SAS internal in a 5.25" bay. I'm not sure how much that costs these days.

I didn't find a satisfactory software for spanning multiple tapes, so for now it is used to update individual high-value directories.

Robustness seems good to me. No failures yet.
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How big are tapes and what do they run? Also, what software do you use to do the backup?
 
decuser said:
How big are tapes and what do they run? Also, what software do you use to do the backup?
Click to expand...

800 GB uncompressed. They run magnetic particles, not sure I understand the question. I use tar. But as I said, I am looking for something more complex that can split file trees across multiple tapes while keeping track of which file is on which tape.
 
I have two functioning tape drives at home. One is an Exabyte 5 GB drive, another is a LTO drive (don't remember the exact capacity, it is from about 2005). They are not used at all in production, but I once every few years have to read an old tape. I don't have any 3592 drives at home.

In spite of what many people say, tape is not at all dead. For archival and backup application, it remains a very competitive technology. There is recently been an uptick in R&D for improving tape speed and capacity; a few friends who were working on other things are back to tape head technology.
 
cracauer@ said:
But as I said, I am looking for something more complex that can split file trees across multiple tapes while keeping track of which file is on which tape.
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Have you looked at LTFS? I've never used it, but the project was created by people I know well. I have no idea whether it would be practical to use with a single tape drive; it might be designed with libraries in mind. But I know that some of the developers used laptops with SAS interfaces and single drives on their desks.
 
cracauer@ said:
800 GB uncompressed. They run magnetic particles, not sure I understand the question. I use tar. But as I said, I am looking for something more complex that can split file trees across multiple tapes while keeping track of which file is on which tape.
Click to expand...
Sorry about that, I meant what do they cost. I checked on the web, seems like about $30 US.
 
decuser said:
Sorry about that, I meant what do they cost. I checked on the web, seems like about $30 US.
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I bought all my tapes on Ebay, most of them new. Prices all over the place, when lucky there was an auction. Don't remember details. I assume LTO4 is very cheap by now.
 
For personal backups, I think it's important to figure out what you are protecting, and how you are most likely to want to use the backups.

How many hosts and how much data are we talking about?

Are you time-sensitive to recovery? i.e. Would a week's delay kill you? A day? An hour?
 
I just checked the price tag for LTO drives. These are a serious investment, and you can get a huge pile of SSD/SR drives for that.
What would the benefit of tape be here?
 
Regarding long term archives, we talk decades, tapes is the way to go.

What kind of tape technology depends heavily on the value of your data, you are out to to protect against time.

First point for me is always about hardware support over the years. If you got a tape from 1985, it always comes down to the vendor still supporting that technology. That’s what you pay for, hardware support over the decades.

IBM has been the standard in that area for a long time. There is no issue getting a refurbished IBM 3590 B1 drive and read those tapes, even if they have been written on Solaris or AIX and you now have Linux because you got no access to the original hardware.

LTO had till release 4 some serious issues, if you wrote a tape with vendor A and used vendor B for restore, sometimes the tape reported as empty or failure, so you had to keep those drives in stock. However, I haven’t encountered those issues for 7 or 8 so far.

So what is your data worth to you?
 
Crivens said:
I just checked the price tag for LTO drives. These are a serious investment, and you can get a huge pile of SSD/SR drives for that.
What would the benefit of tape be here?
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^^ exactly thats the question. All my clients stopped using tapes around 10 years ago. Considering the density of data on disks I still think HDDs are much more reliable - I had a few incidents with tapes (we lost 50TB in 2007). So from my experience I would advise the OP NOT to use tapes, but get some HDDs and do a zfs scrub once a year on archive disks or every few months on backup disks that are continuously used (meaning: either always switched on or switched on every few days/weeks for your backup purpose). Also, verifying data/backup on disk is a much easier job than with tape.
 
Crivens said:
I just checked the price tag for LTO drives. These are a serious investment, and you can get a huge pile of SSD/SR drives for that.
What would the benefit of tape be here?
Click to expand...

As I said, I snipe the tapes on Ebay. I have way more than I can use by now.

The robustness on the shelf should be unmatched by either SSD (need to be powered up every now and then) or HDD. In a HDD you can have electronics or mechanics break. If that happens for tape you just get a new tape drive and insert your old tapes.
 
How about something like a "Quantum - Ultrium LTO 4 External Tape Drive TC-L42BX"? The number and variety of tape drives is mind boggling. What are the odds this will work with FreeBSD and an Adaptec 2906?
 
decuser said:
How about something like a "Quantum - Ultrium LTO 4 External Tape Drive TC-L42BX"? The number and variety of tape drives is mind boggling. What are the odds this will work with FreeBSD and an Adaptec 2906?
Click to expand...

Should be close to 100%. But watch cable quality. The external one might be loud.
 
decuser said:
How about something like a "Quantum - Ultrium LTO 4 External Tape Drive TC-L42BX"? The number and variety of tape drives is mind boggling. What are the odds this will work with FreeBSD and an Adaptec 2906?
Click to expand...
Perhaps something like the LSI53C1030 might be better suited or just go far a SAS hba which would save you all the SCSI trouble.
 
tape drives kind of suck (the expensive ones less so) but anything less than $3000 new is crap
they are over sensitive to dust and wil fail rather sooner than later
maybe if you have super clean room they will work longer but in my opinion it's not worth the trouble for a home setup
 
decuser said:
Is it loud only when it's backing up or is it like it's got jet engines for cooling?
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The external drive might have a loud fan. I have an internal one partially for that reason.

The drive actually going is always going to be very audible.
 
I was refering to the new price of a tape drive. For the drive alone, you can buy a box full of disk drives and cycle trough them, storing a set at many a place (currently I have a backup solution that has SSDs in a mirror, being locked up in a safe when not in use). The barrier of entry is high for tapes. I once had one but blow me down if I remember where that is today...
 
Alain De Vos said:
Why use a tape when you can have usb disks ?
Do usb tapes exist?
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Well, it also depends on whether your backups get overwritten, stay permanently connected to the computer or go on the shelf. Your robustness against malware goes up once the media are not connected after writing them once.

Not aware of USB LOT tapes, what I have seen is SCSI, SAS and Fibrechannel.
 
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