4 ms·

This is going to sound pretty damn weird, but the last couple of places where I though tape backups would have been the right plan, we had people who saw the ta

by myrryr 3y ago

This is going to sound pretty damn weird, but the last couple of places where I though tape backups would have been the right plan, we had people who saw the tape industry as a bit untrustworthy. Not the tapes, but the industry. It took me a while to find out why, but the whole tape storage size not being their actual size has left a long shadow. It is amazing that something so small can leave such a large bad taste in people's mouths for so long.

nohankyou 3y ago
Unpredictable compression ratios weren't as much of a concern for me as physical failure. The bad taste was from having to unspool an entire backup tape onto the floor with a hand drill to get the tape reader operable again. All of this just so I can load another tape from the previous week to attempt a moonshot at restoring services before everyone wakes up. You can test your restores all you want, but in an emergency, there is a chance it's going to jam up like a printer and destroy your backup at the same time.
- leptons 3y ago
  If you think one tape backup for important stuff is enough, then you did it wrong. Backups for your backups for your backups, is the way.
- myrryr 3y ago
  > Unpredictable compression ratios weren't as much of a concern for me as physical failure. totally. I just think that their quirk in how they advertise has pushed people away from using them at all is interesting. As one guy said, "I can compress stuff on my disks as well, it doesn't mean that they have twice as much capacity, and shouldn't be advertised as such" I thought people would have just kinda shrugged their shoulders and just went "I guess it is just a little weird" but it really has pushed people away.
- ggm 3y ago
  Wound a 9600 bpi on backwards (twisted tape) by mistake and was made to fix it. That was an interesting day.
dabiged 3y ago
I think a lot of people have also been burned by the continuous new rollout of tape formats. People invest in tape because it offers long term offsite storage, but vendors only offer drive life spans in the order of 4-6 years. After this they rollout higher capacity drives/cartridges and force everyone to refresh their entire hardware and tape collection because they end of life equipment. This costs millions of dollars for a medium sized enterprise. LTO5 was released in 2010. It offers all the feature of a LTO9 tape (encryption, compression, RFID chips, partitioning, LTFS support) only with much less space per cartridge. These LTO5 cartridges are still readable with very low error rates regardless of how they were stored 13 years later, but sourcing drives is getting more difficult every year. Tape media needs the equivalent of an LTS Operating System release, where a vendor will guarantee the drives, libraries and cartridge formats will be manufactured, supported and maintained for 20+ years.
- saiya-jin 3y ago
  I guess most regulations require storage of data for 5 years, at least in banking that's the common case. So you can literally throw with added step of destruction at the end of supported life. Lifetime of say 9 guaranteed supported years is useless in such model, no added value over 5. If 10 year ones cost 2x the 5-year ones they are still worse deal for company (with added cycle of safe erase to reuse). Also, "very low error rates" sounds pretty bad - if I need to get back some client documents 95% success rate is abysmal and unacceptable, even 99% is NOK for most use cases. Unless you mean some self-correcting ones, but then we still have 100% reliability.
  - chongli 3y ago
    if I need to get back some client documents 95% success rate is abysmal and unacceptable, even 99% is NOK for most use cases Parchives [1] solved this problem a long time ago. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive
- jl6 3y ago
  On the other hand, the weak commitment to backward compatibility enables new drive/tape technology to move forward. It’s a good thing that we have LTO9 densities. LTO drives have two generations of backward read compatibility, and LTO7 drives are readily available, so those 13-year-old LTO5 tapes aren’t stranded yet. 13+ years is pretty good when most enterprise equipment gets depreciated after ~7 years.
RecycledEle 3y ago
Tape companies are lying scum.

by myrryr 3y ago

nohankyou 3y ago

Unpredictable compression ratios weren't as much of a concern for me as physical failure. The bad taste was from having to unspool an entire backup tape onto the floor with a hand drill to get the tape reader operable again. All of this just so I can load another tape from the previous week to attempt a moonshot at restoring services before everyone wakes up. You can test your restores all you want, but in an emergency, there is a chance it's going to jam up like a printer and destroy your backup at the same time.

leptons 3y ago
If you think one tape backup for important stuff is enough, then you did it wrong. Backups for your backups for your backups, is the way.
myrryr 3y ago
> Unpredictable compression ratios weren't as much of a concern for me as physical failure. totally. I just think that their quirk in how they advertise has pushed people away from using them at all is interesting. As one guy said, "I can compress stuff on my disks as well, it doesn't mean that they have twice as much capacity, and shouldn't be advertised as such" I thought people would have just kinda shrugged their shoulders and just went "I guess it is just a little weird" but it really has pushed people away.
ggm 3y ago
Wound a 9600 bpi on backwards (twisted tape) by mistake and was made to fix it. That was an interesting day.

dabiged 3y ago

I think a lot of people have also been burned by the continuous new rollout of tape formats. People invest in tape because it offers long term offsite storage, but vendors only offer drive life spans in the order of 4-6 years. After this they rollout higher capacity drives/cartridges and force everyone to refresh their entire hardware and tape collection because they end of life equipment. This costs millions of dollars for a medium sized enterprise. LTO5 was released in 2010. It offers all the feature of a LTO9 tape (encryption, compression, RFID chips, partitioning, LTFS support) only with much less space per cartridge. These LTO5 cartridges are still readable with very low error rates regardless of how they were stored 13 years later, but sourcing drives is getting more difficult every year. Tape media needs the equivalent of an LTS Operating System release, where a vendor will guarantee the drives, libraries and cartridge formats will be manufactured, supported and maintained for 20+ years.

saiya-jin 3y ago
I guess most regulations require storage of data for 5 years, at least in banking that's the common case. So you can literally throw with added step of destruction at the end of supported life. Lifetime of say 9 guaranteed supported years is useless in such model, no added value over 5. If 10 year ones cost 2x the 5-year ones they are still worse deal for company (with added cycle of safe erase to reuse). Also, "very low error rates" sounds pretty bad - if I need to get back some client documents 95% success rate is abysmal and unacceptable, even 99% is NOK for most use cases. Unless you mean some self-correcting ones, but then we still have 100% reliability.
- chongli 3y ago
  if I need to get back some client documents 95% success rate is abysmal and unacceptable, even 99% is NOK for most use cases Parchives [1] solved this problem a long time ago. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive
jl6 3y ago
On the other hand, the weak commitment to backward compatibility enables new drive/tape technology to move forward. It’s a good thing that we have LTO9 densities. LTO drives have two generations of backward read compatibility, and LTO7 drives are readily available, so those 13-year-old LTO5 tapes aren’t stranded yet. 13+ years is pretty good when most enterprise equipment gets depreciated after ~7 years.

RecycledEle 3y ago

Tape companies are lying scum.