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> The different media types is probably the hardest issue; I'd wager that for most people, backing up > 2 TB on anything but spinning rust will be impractical/p
by tlamponi 5y ago
> The different media types is probably the hardest issue; I'd wager that for most people, backing up > 2 TB on anything but spinning rust will be impractical/prohibitively expensive.
There's LTO (Linear Tape Open), LTO-8 has 12 TB of raw capacity and costs about 65 - 70 €.
The newest variant (not yet _that_ widely available), LTO-9 has 18 TB.
You need a few to handle rotation, but for most that means at max 10 plus one new per year for the long term archive.
We provide Tape support in our open source Proxmox Backup Server product, it can handle single drives and drive robots (with auto exchangers that lessen the work on tape rotation), the data is deduplicated, compressed and optionally encrypted.
https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/tape-backup.html https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/tape-backup.html
PBS can also efficiently mirror to remotes:
https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/managing-remotes.html https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/managing-remotes.html
Check the introduction/main feature section for more info if you're interested:
https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/introduction.html https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/introduction.html
- storyinmemo 5y agoThe cost of the tapes isn't what keeps me from having it home. It's the cost of the tape drive.
- tlamponi 5y agoI mean, it's a one time investment that's may be good for a decade or so, depending on the setup and workloads. But yes, forking over a 2 to 4k for a new LTO-7+ changer isn't a small investment for private use, for a company it's IMO a no-brainer though. FWIW: You can get them often cheaper, e.g., at ebay or whatever your local online reseller space is. For example, one can get LTO-5 ones here for 300 - 400 bucks and LTO-6 for 600 to 800. While LTO-6 only has 2.5 TB of space you can also create tape-sets (e.g., spanning multiple tapes) and for the more important data it may even be enough.
- detaro 5y agoages ago there also was always the recommendation that you should have two drives, so if one gets out of alignment you'll notice when it starts to create tapes that proper drives can't read anymore. Not sure if that's still a concern with modern ones?