4 ms·
The problem is it's near impossible to get a tape backup system at home. It's all fun to say "oh a single tape can do 15TB" but it must cost in the thousands a
by sqldba 8y ago
The problem is it's near impossible to get a tape backup system at home.
It's all fun to say "oh a single tape can do 15TB" but it must cost in the thousands and thousands of dollars.
- CaliforniaKarl 8y agoI think that's because the market has shrunk so much. I remember when I was younger, I got a single SCSI external tape drive, and some tapes, from the Micro Center in Cincinnati Ohio. I then used that to back up my computer while I was in college. I've forgotten so many of the details, like the model of drive and tape, and the backup software (it was Mac OS). I do know it wasn't LTO, though, because it had to be rewound. These days, were I to do something like that, I'd do BD-R. Yeah, you're only talking 50 GB or so (uncompressed) per disc, but that's not bad!
- mrpippy 8y agoProbably Retrospect for the backup software, it was the standard on Mac OS. I feel like 8mm was probably the most common consumer (i.e. cheap) tape format, but also could’ve been 4mm.
- CaliforniaKarl 8y agoYup, it was Retrospect!
- jabl 8y agoAs a kid, we had one of those home/small business targeted drives that attached to the PC via the floppy drive controller. QIC, or whatever it was called. Native capacity was ~120 MB, and the drive had some built-in compression so it was marketed as 250 MB. It made a horrible screeching noise when running. Linux even had a driver for it at some point (ftape), but IIRC it has since been removed due to lack of use. Never used it though, by the time I got more into Linux that drive was already obsolete. But yeah, today the startup cost of a tape drive is so high that it doesn't make sense for home usage. At home I use borg backup (https://www.borgbackup.org/ https://www.borgbackup.org/ ) nowadays, backing up to external USB hard drives.
- agumonkey 8y agoI had a HP colorado backup (400/800), I think it's QIC like. Tried to use it on an old p3 box with win95, and was utterly surprised that win95 backup application had support for generic backup tape drives that allowed me to restore the tape content. I also love the super smooth mechanical sounds of tape drives, even at the cost of slow seek.
- memco 8y agoLTO has to rewind in certain circumstances. The file listing can be browsed without having to seek, but the accessing the content, writing or erasing cannot. Still somewhat unlikely it was LTO, but probably not due to the rewinding.
- kartickv 8y agoWhat is LTO, and why doesn't it need rewinding?
- ams6110 8y agoI knew a guy in the 1990s who hacked a VCR to be a data backup device. I can't recall if he used the video track or the HD Audio track but he said the tapes actually had quite a large capacity and of course were not very expensive.
- kalleboo 8y agoThere were commercial products to use your VCR for data backups https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid Danmere Backer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUS0Zv2APjU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUS0Zv2APjU (LGR)
- gehwartzen 8y agoWould be great if this was the sort of thing local libraries could help out with; they provide the read/write hardware and you bring the tape and data.