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Another crucial importance is bytes per square centimetre. When archiving something, there's no point in archiving hundreds of storage controllers with it espec
by robjan 7y ago
Another crucial importance is bytes per square centimetre. When archiving something, there's no point in archiving hundreds of storage controllers with it especially if you need to store them in a safe (which you probably should). MicroSD cards may beat tape but they are a lot slower and harder to label.
- koolba 7y agoWhich one wins on long term storage durability, shock proof, and water damage?
- blotter_paper 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
- bt848 7y agoLTO doesn't suffer from those things. Shock can destroy the case and dislodge the leader pin of an LTO cartridge but AFAIK it can't damage the data on the tape. Water is bad for the transport but as long as you dry your tapes out they should still work. The operating specs for LTO are crazy, you can read and write them under all practical atmospheric conditions.
- mkj 7y agoSmoke haze will cause all kinds of trouble for tape drives though.
- zaarn 7y agoSo don't run the backups when the DC is on fire, got it.
- bacon_waffle 7y agoAs will very dry conditions. The IceCube neutrino telescope at South Pole used LTO-3 tapes to store data until they switched to only hard drives around 5 years ago. At that point, the newer tape drives had been tried (IIRC LTO-5 was the industry standard by then) but they never seemed to work, presumably because the humidity on station is incredibly low. It was considered more reasonable to keep the old LTO-3 equipment in use, versus building a humidor for the tapes and drives.
- ramraj07 7y agoMr. Robot was a liar!
- rodgerd 7y agoLTO turns out to be garbage on the key measure of "can I read my backups a little while down the road", because you'd be surprised how quickly a new LTO drive can't read old tapes. It's unpleasant having to buy old drives to keep with your tape archives because you won't otherwise be able to read them any more.
- liability 7y agoCan't you just keep the old drives you wrote the old tapes with?
- rodgerd 7y agoUntil they break. Then you can't get a new one. Source: have done this at scale, have spent time scouring the second-hand market to cobble together early-generation LTO drives.
- liability 7y agoAlways buy two I guess. That messes with the affordability calculus though.
- protomyth 7y agoYou should have at least two to have critical redundancy. Not to mention making backup testing easier.
- Dylan16807 7y agoOkay, so by 'a little while' you mean a pretty significant amount of time. If you plan up front to migrate to new tapes every two generations (shrinking your collection 4x in the process!) then you'll never need a particularly old machine.
- protomyth 7y agoYeah, well true but mechanisms degrade and each generation is a pretty long as electronics go. The two generations ago reading should be an indication that you need to retake the old data. Getting old working drives is a pain, and the rental prices aren't cheap because you often need an expansion card to interface with the older drives.
- sliken 7y agoI had a room full of servers, many with 16-36 disks per server and had an AC failure. Things turned off as planned, but it hit 115F for a bit. None of the disks died, majority of the tapes did.
- userbinator 7y agoThat sounds unusual. Tape shouldn't degrade that easily. 115F is 46C, which is hot for a human and not a good temperature for long-term storage, but not anywhere near immediately hazardous to the media. Was it LTO or some other type of tape?
- sliken 7y agoLTO, the archival temp is REALLY narrow, only 61-77F. Just google "lto storage temperature" and google will pop up a card based on the IBM data.
- protomyth 7y agoThat is the range of temperatures if you are going to be storing the tape for over 6 months.
- sliken 7y agoYes, note the operational temperature is below 115F as well.
- protomyth 7y agoThat's if you are actively trying to do backup.
- sliken 7y agoTrue, I don't remember if the backup software was running. However we lost tapes in the cartridge in the drive (7 tapes I think) and also tapes in other cartridges (banks of 7). I think we had 4 cartridges of 7, then upgraded to a newer robot that had 8 cartridges of 11. At the time I was pretty shocked, and asked around and apparently it wasn't a particularly unusual event. Fortunately we always kept a cartridge rotated out to a different room.
- philjohn 7y agoTape vs SD cards? Tape. NAND flash can leak charge over time if not powered on which makes it unsuitable as an archival medium. Depending on P/E cycles each cell has undergone and the drive type (SLC/MLC/TLC/QLC) it can be from 3 months to 10 years.