5 ms·

Tape storage is still the most optimal form of long-term storage. If you need to store things for an exceptionally long time, such as financial data, scientific

Tape storage is still the most optimal form of long-term storage. If you need to store things for an exceptionally long time, such as financial data, scientific data, etc, then you're going to get the most bang for your buck on tape.

barkingcat 11y ago
Yes but if you were in this target market you'd likely want your information on your own tape with a reading infrastructure you control.
- Sanddancer 11y ago
  Depends. Having an in-house key and shipping everything to Amazon encrypted means that you have all the infrastructure there and waiting, and not capable of being read. Additionally, that tape library would need to be stored, and periodically tested so that tapes can be rotated out as needed. Sending that data to a service like glacier means you've shown due diligence, but at the same time, don't need to maintain a schedule of testing every disk every year.
  - PhantomGremlin 11y ago
    don't need to maintain a schedule of testing every disk every year. So you trust Glacier or Google Nearline (or any similar provider) without testing? No testing ever??? I wouldn't feel happy with my critical data floating around in the cloud, without my checking it at least once a year to make sure it really exists. And once you do start verifying that data, you will incur all sorts of charges to access it.
- vonklaus 11y ago
  this was what I meant. thanks. You can buy a 5tb hard drive for ~138.00. You could likely buy several of them at discount to get started. As you go forward in time, these will become much cheaper, allowing you to continue purchasing them on demand from the market for much less money. This allows you to trivially share, copy, move and retrieve that data quickly as well as fully control who has access and when. I am sure there are use cases for this but in a situation where you have petabyte scale data, it is often the case that you also have the infrastructure to save it. How many places would need to store >5tb of data a week that * don't have this capability in house * will almost never need to access it again. * will not need it in a timely manner, if they do need to access it again. * don't have the money to implement their dedicated server and storage on site for this purpose. I am not saying that this rules everyone out, but the prices are so low, and tape must be so annoying, I couldn't imagine why they keep offering this. Obviously, some peopel must be using it but in 2016 with storage prices being so low already, i don't know how many places have this amount of data and meet the above requirements.
  - grogenaut 11y ago
    2 Words: Offsite Backup
vonklaus 11y ago
The post states he paid $150 yo retrieve 60gb of data. For $150 you can buy a 5tb hdd drive. What usecase could the price delta make sense to have a 4 hour feedback loop and all of your important data locked in someone elses data center. the usecase where your data is so properly massive that this makes sense && you don't have the storage infrastructure in place, is so narrow that it doesnt make sense. It is basically one research student's crawl data Edit: also, s3 is pretty cheap. So again, i dont really see the usecase here. How much room is in the market between your own physical or digital system and amazon s3 or an equivalent. you would have to have a massive amount of data you dont care about and be very price sensitive.
- 88e282102ae2e5b 11y ago
  Durability is one reason. A physical hard drive in my desk is so much more susceptible to destruction or loss or theft.
  - bigiain 11y ago
    This. The data I care about is already backed up on two different multi-TB drives at home, and another one at work. Glacier is the contingency for "something took out the original data and all three backups in two different locations 7 or 8km apart - if I'm still alive after whatever just happened, I'll consider whether or not to pay Amazon a grand or so to retrieve it quickly from Glacier, or wait ~20 months to get it all for single-digit-dollars".
    - manigandham 11y ago
      If you're talking about personal data, why not just use backblaze and amazon's consumer unlimited cloud storage? That gives you 2 backup providers that can durably store everything and it's free and quick to access. Why deal with all the harddrives and glacier?
      - 88e282102ae2e5b 11y ago
        Neither of those seem free - am I looking in the wrong place? Also there's no Linux client for either AFAICT.

barkingcat 11y ago

Yes but if you were in this target market you'd likely want your information on your own tape with a reading infrastructure you control.

Sanddancer 11y ago
Depends. Having an in-house key and shipping everything to Amazon encrypted means that you have all the infrastructure there and waiting, and not capable of being read. Additionally, that tape library would need to be stored, and periodically tested so that tapes can be rotated out as needed. Sending that data to a service like glacier means you've shown due diligence, but at the same time, don't need to maintain a schedule of testing every disk every year.
- PhantomGremlin 11y ago
  don't need to maintain a schedule of testing every disk every year. So you trust Glacier or Google Nearline (or any similar provider) without testing? No testing ever??? I wouldn't feel happy with my critical data floating around in the cloud, without my checking it at least once a year to make sure it really exists. And once you do start verifying that data, you will incur all sorts of charges to access it.
vonklaus 11y ago
this was what I meant. thanks. You can buy a 5tb hard drive for ~138.00. You could likely buy several of them at discount to get started. As you go forward in time, these will become much cheaper, allowing you to continue purchasing them on demand from the market for much less money. This allows you to trivially share, copy, move and retrieve that data quickly as well as fully control who has access and when. I am sure there are use cases for this but in a situation where you have petabyte scale data, it is often the case that you also have the infrastructure to save it. How many places would need to store >5tb of data a week that * don't have this capability in house * will almost never need to access it again. * will not need it in a timely manner, if they do need to access it again. * don't have the money to implement their dedicated server and storage on site for this purpose. I am not saying that this rules everyone out, but the prices are so low, and tape must be so annoying, I couldn't imagine why they keep offering this. Obviously, some peopel must be using it but in 2016 with storage prices being so low already, i don't know how many places have this amount of data and meet the above requirements.
- grogenaut 11y ago
  2 Words: Offsite Backup

vonklaus 11y ago

The post states he paid $150 yo retrieve 60gb of data. For $150 you can buy a 5tb hdd drive. What usecase could the price delta make sense to have a 4 hour feedback loop and all of your important data locked in someone elses data center. the usecase where your data is so properly massive that this makes sense && you don't have the storage infrastructure in place, is so narrow that it doesnt make sense. It is basically one research student's crawl data Edit: also, s3 is pretty cheap. So again, i dont really see the usecase here. How much room is in the market between your own physical or digital system and amazon s3 or an equivalent. you would have to have a massive amount of data you dont care about and be very price sensitive.

88e282102ae2e5b 11y ago
Durability is one reason. A physical hard drive in my desk is so much more susceptible to destruction or loss or theft.
- bigiain 11y ago
  This. The data I care about is already backed up on two different multi-TB drives at home, and another one at work. Glacier is the contingency for "something took out the original data and all three backups in two different locations 7 or 8km apart - if I'm still alive after whatever just happened, I'll consider whether or not to pay Amazon a grand or so to retrieve it quickly from Glacier, or wait ~20 months to get it all for single-digit-dollars".
  - manigandham 11y ago
    If you're talking about personal data, why not just use backblaze and amazon's consumer unlimited cloud storage? That gives you 2 backup providers that can durably store everything and it's free and quick to access. Why deal with all the harddrives and glacier?
    - 88e282102ae2e5b 11y ago
      Neither of those seem free - am I looking in the wrong place? Also there's no Linux client for either AFAICT.