12 ms·

Many people don't appreciate tape, but for long term offline storage nothing else comes close. Offline storage is important if you care about things like ranso

• nullc 6y ago
  To be fair, this could be addressed via a firmware enforced write protect switch on the drive... or an electronically settable ball-point-pen resettable write-breaker. There are company now that sell drives with special WORM firmware. I love tape but the economics of tape really just don't look good today. The patent litigation over LTO8 basically assured that. Whole nearline SATA drives are significantly less expensive per byte than LTO8 tapes, even ignoring LTO drive/library costs.
  • est31 6y ago
    > Whole nearline SATA drives are significantly less expensive per byte than LTO8 tapes, even ignoring LTO drive/library costs. In Germany, using non-bulk prices, HDDs seem to start at 19€ per TB while I could find multi-write LTO8 tapes costing 8€ per (compression disabled) TB.
    • nullc 6y ago
      Oh. That is a massive change over the last 6 months. Okay, they're much closer now.
      • throwaway2048 6y ago
        there was a huge patent fight that delayed the production of LTO8 tapes for quite some time, when they finally released they commanded a huge premium, they are still inflated in price compared to LTO7 tapes per GB.
      • Dylan16807 6y ago
        The option has also been there to format LTO-7 tapes in LTO-8 drives and get 9TB each. That cost 7€/TB a couple years ago and 6€/TB today.
    • syshum 6y ago
      While the media is is cheaper LTO8 drives are not. A single Disk writer with manual change can be around 4-5K USD. That is alot of tapes to recover the cost savings over HDD
      • LorenPechtel 6y ago
        Yup. This article made me recheck the economics of tape backup. You'll have to have a lot of data before it becomes cheaper than simply duplicating the storage. Worried about ransomware? Have a dedicated backup machine that does nothing else, it's as isolated as possible, it reads the data to be backed up and writes it to the backup drives.
      • est31 6y ago
        Indeed, it's not economical for most people. Even rental is probably not something that most people would bother with. Most people are served enough by the one or two HDDs they own, maybe a NAS.
    • pnutjam 6y ago
      Don't forget to average the cost of your drives and robots.
    • deleted 6y ago
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  • deleted 6y ago
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  • WalterBright 6y ago
    I really really don't understand why devices don't routinely come with a physical (not software) write-protect switch on them. Disk drives should come with them. Routers should come with them (so malware cannot install itself). Etc.
    • metroholografix 6y ago
      Doesn't get you much, unless the vulnerability requires a writable filesystem in order to be exploited or you really really really want to persist across reboots (not hard but not usually needed) or firmware updates (much harder to do robustly, expertise required). Malware can operate entirely in memory, not touching disk. If access is lost, reinfection can take place (has been used by nation state actors). Even the Mirai botnet which was done by amateurs didn't persist and simply reinfected. So it comes down to your potential adversaries. Actors deploying wide, non-targeted attacks Mirai-style get little value from persistence. It's simply an extra layer of unneeded complexity.
      • deleted 6y ago
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      • PhantomGremlin 6y ago
        Doesn't get you much It can do a lot in the right circumstances. E.g. if a USB thumb drive had a physical write-protect, it could be plugged into a potentially hostile computer without concern about losing the data on the drive. Years ago I saw a few USB thumb drives with that feature. But I don't know if they're out there any more. They're almost as scarce as hens' teeth.
        • Multicomp 6y ago
          Iirc the kanguru series of USB flash drives make bank now that they are one of the few remaining manufacturers of flash drives that have hardware write protect switches.
    • SiVal 6y ago
      I agree. Hardware switches should also be put on computer cameras, microphones, network cards, etc. There will still be vulnerabilities, but most of us use locks on our house and car doors even though thieves can (and do) break the windows. Hardware switches on computer equipment can remove some vulnerabilities and (sometimes) add a means of recovery.
  • halfcat 6y ago
    > There are company now that sell drives with special WORM firmware. Like what? I’d love to check this out.
    • nullc 6y ago
      E.g. https://greentec-usa.com/ https://greentec-usa.com/ I have no experience with them-- I've just assumed it would be overpriced. I'd certainly be interested in worm drives for personal use (e.g. for access logs, and photo archival), but not so interested that I'd pay a big premium over standard drives. :)
• leephillips 6y ago
  Can’t you avoid ransomware by just not using Windows?
  • anoonmoose 6y ago
    Linux is not invulnerable to ransomware, it's just easier to secure.
    • close04 6y ago
      To add to that, Linux is easier to secure because is found mostly in the datacenter (I'll ignore Android for this one). It's not only more robust but it's secured according to a whole different standard than desktops since it doesn't need to be operated by Average Joe. On the other hand the vast majority of Windows installations are either regular home users (with no knowledge for properly setting up their computer, and ideally with the updates disabled because they read on the internet that updates are bad) or corporate desktops (which might be secured better but still at the mercy of a user clicking on everything).
      • manquer 6y ago
        Linux and BSD are found in a lot of places, it is more to do with its design being supportive of all kinds of deployments rather than only just popularity i think. Windows Server administrators are lot more likely to be "certified" and "trained" by MS approved courses than linux admins and of course it does not help. I would say its more likely to find an average joe ( from a devops perspective) running a linux box than a windows box.
        • close04 6y ago
          > average joe ( from a devops perspective) That's a whole different kind of average joe. A mediocre tech person is still an order of magnitude more qualified to take care of a machine than a mediocre user.
    • WatchDog 6y ago
• vadansky 6y ago
  Say I have around 25TB of a personal data hoard. Does tape make sense yet cost wise, instead of buying have it backed up over 2 HDDs?
  • luhn 6y ago
    Most likely not, since you’ll need to purchase a drive for reading and writing the data. That alone will cost more than a couple hard drives.
    • tpmx 6y ago
      Idea for someone: IsTapeBackupWorthIt.com - showing the amount of data you need for tape backups to make sense at any given point in time. Niche audience for sure, but revenue per click is going to be pretty high. If tapes are worth it for someone -> show referal links to some trusted tape provider partner based on region Otherwise, show good deals on hard drives, per region. And recommendations on QNAP/Synology enclosures.
      • tpmx 6y ago
        Someone registered the domain just now, fantastic! I hope they also implement something suitable, instead of just putting some crappy google text ads on it.
  • Spooky23 6y ago
    Tape makes more sense at higher volumes and more difficult retention needs. Even then, as disk sizes crossed the TB boundary, VTL and S3 made many of these use cases difficult to justify tape investments. Early in my career, I worked at a place that had to retain certain records for up to 100 years. At the time (circa 1999), they had a big tape silo solution that probably cost something like $10M/year (or more) to own and staff. Today, capacity for "cool" data is essentially unlimited and near-free. You could host all of that data on a small device locally (if needed), and retain the data (and outsource the engineering for long term retention) in one or more cloud services for <$100k/year>.
  • synack 6y ago
• OriginalPenguin 6y ago
  Both S3 and Google offer file storage where you can set that it can't be overwritten or deleted until a certain date. So you get the best of offline and online storage.
  • pantalaimon 6y ago
    I imagine it to be more expensive than both running disks or tape backup yourself.
    • greedo 6y ago
      AWS S3 Glacier is dirt cheap as long as you don't need to restore. AWS S3 Object Lock is about $.02/GB, Glacier about $.004/GB. If you have a decent connection, cloud storage is hard to beat.
      • pantalaimon 6y ago
        > AWS S3 Glacier is dirt cheap as long as you don't need to restore. What does that even mean? If I don't have to restore, /dev/null will be even cheaper!
      • LadyCailin 6y ago
        It’s been a while since I looked further into this, but are you accounting for data transfer fees as well? I recall that being a non-trivial cost.
        • greedo 6y ago
          I don't know the costs of data egress for Glacier, but standard S3 is around $.09/GB. Considering that most backups are never used, the cost of data egress is usually pretty minimal in the grand scheme of things.
      • gpm 6y ago
        Hmm, the marketing for glacier says "starting at $1 per terabyte per month" (at the top of https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/ https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/) but the pricing page seems to quote $.004/GB = $4/TB as the cheapest storage in the US and the random selection of other regions I clicked on. At $4/TB why would I pick this over blackblaze B2 which is $5/TB (pretty basically the same) but works like live normal block storage instead of taking hours to retrieve (or minutes if you pay extra)? Moreover the download cost from glacier to AWS is $0.02/GB plus at least $0.003/GB in retrieval costs (or $0.09/GB to $0.05/GB to the internet), while the download cost from blackblaze to the internet is only $0.01/GB and is free if it's to many of the members of the bandwidth alliance (notably including cloudflare). I'd have to be looking at many petabytes of data before the miniscule cost savings of glacier data that I actually don't touch is worth it. Or I guess if the data was already in AWS and the egress to blackblaze was going to be too expensive to be worth it.
• hinkley 6y ago
  I had a great conversation with a couple of IT folks once where they objectively covered most of the variables. It came down to capacity, linear write speed, and the relative likelihood of tape adhesion versus bearing stiction. In any given time interval, the balance could shift. Seek time (find beginning of backup N) and cost felt like tie breakers.
• KaiserPro 6y ago
  Tape has two really important features that HDDs don't: o Linear speed o transportability Assuming you can feed the data to a tape drive, it will run at top speed until the tape is full. When you have a tape robot with 25+ drives, this means you can easily keep up with a 40/100gig pipe LTO tapes really are portable. They have been designed to stand up to dropping. The abuse our tapes would get when being transported by the understandably grumpy runners was considerable. We could always get the data out of them. Portable HDDs, not so much.
  • Dylan16807 6y ago
    > Linear speed 360 megabytes per second for LTO-8. You can consistently match/beat that linear speed with two hard drives, each costing a tenth as much as a tape drive.
    • dTal 6y ago
      I feel this comparison is a little glib, considering that when the hard drives fill up you need to buy two new ones, while the tape drive only needs a new tape.
      • skoskie 6y ago
        Fair, but the upfront price of a tape drive is $3-5k. The cost benefit comes down to the equilibrium and how much storage you need.
        • sukilot 6y ago
          Can I take a drive to a copy shop to convert it to tape for $50? (If not, why not?)
          • est31 6y ago
            Pretty sure that there are colocation places out there that have this, but for copy shops I think it wouldn't work because in general, people have too few data. Most people are perfectly served by the HDDs/SSDs that ship with their computers, and the minority that's not served often buys one or two external HDDs of the newest generation. That's enough for the largest part of the population. Fewest private people have data on the order of dozens of TB where HDDs become so expensive that you are motivated to use the user unfriendly tapes. Why are tapes user unfriendly? For each read/write operation you need to visit the copy shop. This limits the use cases to ones where like backups and archival. But you can't really use them for archival as when you don't archive the drive together with your tapes, who guarantees that a copy shop will exist in 10 years that has drives that can read such old tapes? Yes, tape drives have limited read compatibility to older standards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Compatibility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Compatibility But maybe there is a niche for it somewhere, who knows.
• rsync 6y ago
  "Offline storage is important if you care about things like ransomware." There are other solutions to this problem. Specifically, if your cloud storage provider performs zfs snapshots for you, those snapshots are immutable and cannot be altered, or destroyed, by the user login: https://www.rsync.net/products/ransomware.html https://www.rsync.net/products/ransomware.html I'm sure there are similar mechanisms available in S3 and other cloud storage implementations (albeit, perhaps not using ZFS).
  • greedo 6y ago
    Both AWS Glacier and S3 Object Lock are immutable.
  • sukilot 6y ago
    What happens if a customer wants to delete their backup? Do you require a phone call or something? 30day grace period?
    • vbezhenar 6y ago
      If you need to reliably delete any data, encrypt it before uploading and wipe key.
      • LadyCailin 6y ago
        That doesn’t delete the data, just makes it unusable until the encryption algorithm is broken. Which will certainly be a while, but not forever.
        • userbinator 6y ago
          But [1] will the data be worth anything and [2] will you still exist when/if it is broken? I suspect there's a not-insignificant number of people out there who are glad they didn't make the encryption on their old data very strong (and likewise, those who regret having used very strong encryption and lost the key.)
        • 6y ago
• megameter 6y ago
  The limiting factor of tape is in access times and bandwidth relative to size. If the data is written and read too slowly, and your seek times go too high, you start to lose your ability to usefully test, verify and recover the archive, and looking at that chart in the article, the time to fill has exploded recently, from under two hours in the 2000s to over nine now. Can you guarantee operation for nine hours without interruption or power loss? Of course, that doesn't make huge tape storage useless, just less useful as a format for accessing a single giant archive. One answer would have it that not using the whole capacity is OK, and the goal should be to archive a smaller dataset more often. But it's definitely something that demands real engineering work, while a lot of organizations can barely manage to plan for any backup.
  • dredmorbius 6y ago
    Tape works well where storage is partitioned over many units of storage media, access is infrequent relative to total storage, media are well indexed (such that identification, retrieval, and access are trivial), storage is redundant (2+ copies of any given data), and there are multiple read & write heads allowing for simultaneous access. Tape is a very large tank accessed through a very thin (and expensive) straw. But storage quantities offered are immense and reliable. Addressing your concerns, increase the available heads if access is constrained. Tape libraries provide for this.
• eveningcoffee 6y ago
  I have not used the tape personally but I really would like to. The problem is balance between price and size. Only affordable technology seems to be 2 generations old but it is too small for current generation hard drives.