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There has to be something better than tape, I know I'm just a single data point, but I've had _terrible_ luck with tapes over the years. I've tried various opt
by gav 8y ago
There has to be something better than tape, I know I'm just a single data point, but I've had _terrible_ luck with tapes over the years.
I've tried various options over the years but I haven't found a simple OTS non-tape offline backup solution. There's a lot of potential here for a solution.
- theandrewbailey 8y agoSince you're talking about tapes, I'm guessing there's more data than can be put on an external hard drive?
- gav 8y agoLTO-8 tapes can store 12TB (uncompressed) for about $300/ea, which is about 30% less than a disk, with supposedly a 30-year life. The drives start at around $5000.
- cr0sh 8y ago30-year life when the tapes are properly stored in certain environmental conditions. Usually those conditions aren't met properly.
- yellowapple 8y agoI only mentioned tapes specifically because they're probably the most common choice for offline backups (I say "probably" because I don't know the relative numbers between tapes and, say, optical media). You're definitely right, though; there's gotta be a better way. SSDs look promising, though not necessarily for long-term storage (for that, I suspect it'd be hard to beat optical, aside perhaps from printing out a bunch of QR codes or something).
- AstralStorm 8y agoSSD are considered a fail for backup since they do have to be powered on to do maintenance to survive years of storage. However, since you're scheduling recovery tests, might as well run a SMART offline full on the drive to be sure then. More often than a year is good.
- yellowapple 8y ago"Offline" doesn't necessarily mean "unpowered", though. An airgapped system that iterates through a carousel of SSDs and runs drive/filesystem checks would be pretty neat.