3 ms·

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.
- waste_monk 6y ago
  There are a few good reasons why not: 1) An LTO-8 tape (capacity approx 30TB) is around $200 to $300 AUD (depending on brand), so that figure could only work if you're excluding the cost of the tape. LTO-7 (~15TB) costs around $100 to $150 AUD and would probably be more suitable, but it's still a lot of money for what's essentially a consumable item. Also, I would imagine that if the choice was between buying a tape that requires you to go to a third party to use or invest thousands of dollars in a tape drive, or just buying an external HDD you can use at home and unplugging it when not in use (so cryptolockers etc. can't eat your backups), most people would go for the external HDD. Unfortunately LTO-8 drives can't read LTO-6 or earlier (previously the rule of thumb was drives could read/write N -1 and read N - 2 of the drive generation e.g. an LTO-7 could read but not write LTO-5 tapes), and it probably wouldn't make sense to invest in outdated drives capable of writing LTO-6 (~6.25TB) or earlier, even if you could obtain the older LTO-6 or smaller media relatively cheaply. Vendors would not want to support it. 2) Most backup software I'm aware of is designed around recurring jobs (e.g. BackupExec), not one-off jobs, and to store data from a number of backup targets onto a single tape (or set of tapes). You could work around this, but there's no off-the-shelf software for doing so I'm aware of (I know some versions of windows server backup can write direct to tape, but this would have to cope with a variety of source media and also make sure that jobs from different customers are never co-mingled on the same tape, etc.). 3) The cost of the hardware required to achieve a decent turnaround time on the tapes (depending on target time e.g. some customers might pay a premium for same-day conversion) would probably exceed what you're likely to earn selling this service. I doubt it would be financially viable, simply due to the low number of customers.
  - StillBored 6y ago
    "You could work around this, but there's no off-the-shelf software for doing so I'm aware of (I know some versions of windows server backup can write direct to tape," I think what you are looking for is LTFS.
    - waste_monk 6y ago
      Not so much the filesystem, more that assuming you have a server with a multitude of our customers HDD's attached as well as one or more tape libraries / drives, you need to: * Map 1 to N HDDs to one customer (by USB port ID or perhaps SATA port if you shuck them for performance reasons, maybe a mix of SATA and USB drives) - will need to have some means of clearly indicating ports, or have blinky LEDs next to them and have the server indicate where stuff ought to be plugged in. And handle SATA hot-swap if required. * Allocate a tape or tapes to them (and if they provide their own tape/s make sure to use specific slot/s in the tape library for that customer) and otherwise handle the tape library logistics. This becomes more complex if you have multiple libraries in play. * Perform scheduling and ETA estimation to see if you'll actually get their data onto the tape within the deadline (you might offer a turnaround of a day, but offer a premium service to have it done within N hours) and see if it will affect other customers. This may even involve deciding that an existing currently running job is early enough that you might stop it and scratch the tapes, then run the priority job instead. * Handle predictive maintenance, drive cleaning, etc. for the tape library (and how it will affect customer deadlines / capacity planning) * Actually copying the data onto the tape/s and verifying the result * Integrate into a monitoring and notification system so customers are alerted when their order is ready to pick up, talk to customer billing/sales systems, etc. * Probably a bunch of other stuff I haven't thought of yet The system would generally have to be resilient enough that it can run unattended overnight / for long periods of time, but flexible enough in scheduling that it can handle sudden rush orders, drives being offline for maintenance, and so on. And ideally could be operated by staff with minimal technical background. Maybe Iron Mountain or someone like that have this sort of system already, but I am not aware of any commercially or generally available software that could do the job.
      - 6y ago
- KaiserPro 6y ago
  Thats not where tape it useful. Tape only makes sense when you have tape robot. A bit rack type thing that has more than 5 drives and thousands of slots. Unless you are on a very tight power/heat budget and you have a brilliant asset management/storage system then tape isn't the answer.

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.
waste_monk 6y ago
There are a few good reasons why not: 1) An LTO-8 tape (capacity approx 30TB) is around $200 to $300 AUD (depending on brand), so that figure could only work if you're excluding the cost of the tape. LTO-7 (~15TB) costs around $100 to $150 AUD and would probably be more suitable, but it's still a lot of money for what's essentially a consumable item. Also, I would imagine that if the choice was between buying a tape that requires you to go to a third party to use or invest thousands of dollars in a tape drive, or just buying an external HDD you can use at home and unplugging it when not in use (so cryptolockers etc. can't eat your backups), most people would go for the external HDD. Unfortunately LTO-8 drives can't read LTO-6 or earlier (previously the rule of thumb was drives could read/write N -1 and read N - 2 of the drive generation e.g. an LTO-7 could read but not write LTO-5 tapes), and it probably wouldn't make sense to invest in outdated drives capable of writing LTO-6 (~6.25TB) or earlier, even if you could obtain the older LTO-6 or smaller media relatively cheaply. Vendors would not want to support it. 2) Most backup software I'm aware of is designed around recurring jobs (e.g. BackupExec), not one-off jobs, and to store data from a number of backup targets onto a single tape (or set of tapes). You could work around this, but there's no off-the-shelf software for doing so I'm aware of (I know some versions of windows server backup can write direct to tape, but this would have to cope with a variety of source media and also make sure that jobs from different customers are never co-mingled on the same tape, etc.). 3) The cost of the hardware required to achieve a decent turnaround time on the tapes (depending on target time e.g. some customers might pay a premium for same-day conversion) would probably exceed what you're likely to earn selling this service. I doubt it would be financially viable, simply due to the low number of customers.
- StillBored 6y ago
  "You could work around this, but there's no off-the-shelf software for doing so I'm aware of (I know some versions of windows server backup can write direct to tape," I think what you are looking for is LTFS.
  - waste_monk 6y ago
    Not so much the filesystem, more that assuming you have a server with a multitude of our customers HDD's attached as well as one or more tape libraries / drives, you need to: * Map 1 to N HDDs to one customer (by USB port ID or perhaps SATA port if you shuck them for performance reasons, maybe a mix of SATA and USB drives) - will need to have some means of clearly indicating ports, or have blinky LEDs next to them and have the server indicate where stuff ought to be plugged in. And handle SATA hot-swap if required. * Allocate a tape or tapes to them (and if they provide their own tape/s make sure to use specific slot/s in the tape library for that customer) and otherwise handle the tape library logistics. This becomes more complex if you have multiple libraries in play. * Perform scheduling and ETA estimation to see if you'll actually get their data onto the tape within the deadline (you might offer a turnaround of a day, but offer a premium service to have it done within N hours) and see if it will affect other customers. This may even involve deciding that an existing currently running job is early enough that you might stop it and scratch the tapes, then run the priority job instead. * Handle predictive maintenance, drive cleaning, etc. for the tape library (and how it will affect customer deadlines / capacity planning) * Actually copying the data onto the tape/s and verifying the result * Integrate into a monitoring and notification system so customers are alerted when their order is ready to pick up, talk to customer billing/sales systems, etc. * Probably a bunch of other stuff I haven't thought of yet The system would generally have to be resilient enough that it can run unattended overnight / for long periods of time, but flexible enough in scheduling that it can handle sudden rush orders, drives being offline for maintenance, and so on. And ideally could be operated by staff with minimal technical background. Maybe Iron Mountain or someone like that have this sort of system already, but I am not aware of any commercially or generally available software that could do the job.
    - 6y ago
KaiserPro 6y ago
Thats not where tape it useful. Tape only makes sense when you have tape robot. A bit rack type thing that has more than 5 drives and thousands of slots. Unless you are on a very tight power/heat budget and you have a brilliant asset management/storage system then tape isn't the answer.