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I'm well-aware that tape is still the king for datacenter-level storage, and I'd love to have a tape drive for my ever-increasing size of my personal backup. T
by segfaultbuserr 7y ago
I'm well-aware that tape is still the king for datacenter-level storage, and I'd love to have a tape drive for my ever-increasing size of my personal backup.
Their advantages to me is obvious: its inexpensive price and great longterm reliability beats any alternative choices: hard drives, optical drives, or solid-state drives, and sometimes cloud. Also, it's cool to put my "tape archive" (.tar) files on a real tape! But I found for personal uses, tapes aren't cost-effective, the entry-cost and initial investment of the tape drive is extremely high, it's all enterprise-grade SCSI or SAN. Unless you already have tens of terabytes of data (video studio?), buying a tape drive is unjustified. HDDs are still sometimes the only cost-effective choice for personal use.
Now I mainly use HDDs for large backups (> 300 GiB), multiple Blu-ray disks for medium-size backups (< 100 GiB), and use cloud for the smallest archives. I don't know if Amazon's "mail your drive to the cloud" service is available at my location, but it's also an attractive solution.
I'd like to hear about your experience.
- Moru 7y agoDid you try backblaze.com yet?
- segfaultbuserr 7y agoI think any cloud solution is limited by the broadband uplink. It takes 24 hours to upload "only" 200 GiB of data over a 20 Mbps uplink. It's fine for longterm backup that literally nobody touches unless the computer breaks, but one still has to be patient enough to backup a RAID array...
- throw0101a 7y agoBackblaze has a service where they ship you a disk pack, you back up to the unit, and then ship it back: * https://www.backblaze.com/b2/solutions/datatransfer/fireball.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/solutions/datatransfer/fireball...
- segfaultbuserr 7y agoGreat to hear that, thanks for the comment.
- seized 7y agoNote that's for B2, their S3 like service that is paid for per GB. It doesn't apply to their unlimited tier they are more known for.
- criddell 7y agoYou could also change your internet service to something reasonable for a month or two until your initial backup is complete.
- vorpalhex 7y agoIt's the consumer upload pipe that's the issue, and it's very likely there's no higher upload available. I've literally tried to throw money at the local ISPs and the best I can get is ~35mbs/up despite having about a half gig down.
- criddell 7y agoOh wow. At my house in Austin I have AT&T fiber and get 1 gpbs up and down with no caps for $60 / month. I use BackBlaze to backup up my NAS and it works great.
- vorpalhex 7y agoAT&T is technically an option, but since their "pay for privacy" debacle[1] and terrible support that somehow makes Spectrum appear caring, I'd rather burn my money for warmth then give it to them. [1] - https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/10/03/att-drops-its-controversial-extra-charge-for-priva.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/10/03/att-drops-its-cont...
- sliken 7y agoDid you ask if you can go onsite and leave something overnight to finish the upload?