LTO6 here, I bought it at Newegg. It’s pricy but having a 2.5TB and fairly durable cartridge is nice for my needs. I just dropped one earlier this week, no b

LTO6 here, I bought it at Newegg. It’s pricy but having a 2.5TB and fairly durable cartridge is nice for my needs. I just dropped one earlier this week, no big deal though. I use LTFS on it, it has latency but it’s faster than you expect and once you’re streaming on or off of it, it’s downright quick. Historically, I burned optical media for this but the size of tape makes it much easier. It’s on a SAS card in a linux server, I literally plugged it in and it worked with open SUSE. I forget if the tape tools were already there or not but the old school Unix stuff just worked. I installed the ltfs tools and it all worked without any tricks. It’s a quantum drive. I did experiment with tar initially but ltfs makes it radically more usable, radically. Pre-tape, I used disks, rotated them and kept them in a safe. Burned optical discs of my most important stuff. I had two experiences that caused me to change: I had a failure and went to do a recovery and in either haste or anxiety (I put this on me, I should have paused and took more time but I was rushing) I knocked the most recent drive off my desk and effectively killed it. The other was a bit more subtle (oddly, I have only had 3 backup recovery situations and I messed up 2 of them) but my “backup” was rsync to disk on cron and a backup started during restore and began to “remove” my good backup because the master didn’t have that restored yet. There are a lot of lessons in there, most significantly, “backup” is a different thing than live access to data, you want it versioned and somewhat fixed. Rsync isnt it. You don’t want to accidentally delete your backup. Tape switches your mindset on that stuff. I’m not going to pretend it’s cost effective for my needs (although I have a lot of hd+ video of my kids) but it’s durable, it’s purpose built and cold storage can’t really be hacked. There’s no monthly fees, no risk of a cloud provider sunsetting my tier of service, and 25T of tape is like $250. Drive MTBF numbers are big enough to be abstract and yet you will likely encounter it at some point, tape has these practical numbers that are ultra conservative and come from decades of experience; you sort of keep it in mind when you’ve used a tape a dozen times or so. That being said, when the drive flakes, I’m in for an expensive upgrade/replacement and when I do upgrade, I should copy my tapes to new ones with the new format which will take time and money. With SMR, it’s almost like discs are taking on tape like qualities and it’s not hard to find stories about people getting crap performance on their new disks. It’s not sexy but I feel very confident that I’ll be able to get my data if I need it. It’s really easy to store a tape in your safe deposit box or at your parents house too, they won’t accidentally kill it by knocking it off a shelf.