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> It may sound like a sales pitch, but it’s not; it’s a call for action Your entire article sounds like a sales pitch. Your solution is, well, it's bad, bu

> It may sound like a sales pitch, but it’s not; it’s a call for action Your entire article sounds like a sales pitch. Your solution is, well, it's bad, but trust us, we can maybe recover it anyways. Otherwise your article fails to convey anything meaningful.

derefr 2y ago
No, the call-to-action being referenced in the article is "stop archiving to hard drives" (and use tape instead, every other industry does.)
- ganoushoreilly 2y ago
  I think it is or at least tries to be more than that. Not only stop archiving to HD's but understand the dependency requirements which is a whole secondary problem.
- natch 2y ago
  The last time I used a tape it broke right off the reel the first time I used it. Good name brand tape drive, good name brand tape. I felt pretty burned by that experience after the money spent and the result.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  Tape drives aren't economical. If you're a big company, sure, they make sense, but for individuals and small companies, they really don't'. Hard drives are absolutely the only realistic and affordable way to back up data. They're not bulletproof though, so you need multiple hard drives, and you need a backup strategy that rotates them, so even if one fails, you haven't lost too much.
  - aidenn0 2y ago
    They are already paying another company to warehouse the drives; surely that company could offer to rent LTO drives going back several generations?
  - nxobject 2y ago
    As someone who only needs to backup 10TB, I looked once at getting into tape - the cost of getting a tape drive and a way to connect it to my computer was eye-watering. The very long-term prospects were even worse: I’d have to choose between buying multiple LTO-n tape drives for redundancy, or keep upgrading every 7ish years or so, which entails buying more tape drives. I’ll stick with my 10 2TB hard drives, zfs, and biannual swaps to new hard drives, sadly. At least I won’t ever have to deal with more than 10 hard drives at time, assuming $/GB never increases. At some point I should start sticking a Windows hard disk image on there; .vhd will still probably be readable and bootable in a VM 10 years from now.
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      Yeah, with the current cost of 10TB 3.5" HDDs, you could probably buy 10-20 of them for the cost of the LTO solution.
  - kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
    Older generations of LTO are economical if your storage requirements are modest.
- kmeisthax 2y ago
  Tape has it's own problems. LTO drives only have 2 generations of backwards compatibility[0] and nobody makes new drives for old formats. So if you have a whole library of tapes you'll need to copy tapes over periodically to newer formats just to retain access to them, which is expensive. And once you start doing that, you've just quashed THE advantage tape had over disk. LTO doesn't provide any more reliability, it just shifts the failure points around. Instead of 20 year old sealed hard drives with bearings that will seize up and render your data unreadable, it'll be perfectly stable 20 year old tapes that no drive in the world can read. I'm also skeptical of the cost savings from cheap media once periodic remigrations are priced in, but it might still win out over disk for absolutely enormous libraries (e.g. entire Hollywood studio productions). And no, there isn't some other tape format that has better long-term support. Oracle stopped upgrading T10000 around 2017, and IBM 3592 has an even worse backwards compatibility story than LTO. [0] LTO-8 drives only have 1 generation of backwards compatibility because TMR heads get trashed by metal particulate tapes
  - ars 2y ago
    Store some drives (readers) with the tapes, include an IDE (or whatever it is) to USB adapter if you are worried.

derefr 2y ago

No, the call-to-action being referenced in the article is "stop archiving to hard drives" (and use tape instead, every other industry does.)

ganoushoreilly 2y ago
I think it is or at least tries to be more than that. Not only stop archiving to HD's but understand the dependency requirements which is a whole secondary problem.
natch 2y ago
The last time I used a tape it broke right off the reel the first time I used it. Good name brand tape drive, good name brand tape. I felt pretty burned by that experience after the money spent and the result.
shiroiushi 2y ago
Tape drives aren't economical. If you're a big company, sure, they make sense, but for individuals and small companies, they really don't'. Hard drives are absolutely the only realistic and affordable way to back up data. They're not bulletproof though, so you need multiple hard drives, and you need a backup strategy that rotates them, so even if one fails, you haven't lost too much.
- aidenn0 2y ago
  They are already paying another company to warehouse the drives; surely that company could offer to rent LTO drives going back several generations?
- nxobject 2y ago
  As someone who only needs to backup 10TB, I looked once at getting into tape - the cost of getting a tape drive and a way to connect it to my computer was eye-watering. The very long-term prospects were even worse: I’d have to choose between buying multiple LTO-n tape drives for redundancy, or keep upgrading every 7ish years or so, which entails buying more tape drives. I’ll stick with my 10 2TB hard drives, zfs, and biannual swaps to new hard drives, sadly. At least I won’t ever have to deal with more than 10 hard drives at time, assuming $/GB never increases. At some point I should start sticking a Windows hard disk image on there; .vhd will still probably be readable and bootable in a VM 10 years from now.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    Yeah, with the current cost of 10TB 3.5" HDDs, you could probably buy 10-20 of them for the cost of the LTO solution.
- kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
  Older generations of LTO are economical if your storage requirements are modest.
kmeisthax 2y ago
Tape has it's own problems. LTO drives only have 2 generations of backwards compatibility[0] and nobody makes new drives for old formats. So if you have a whole library of tapes you'll need to copy tapes over periodically to newer formats just to retain access to them, which is expensive. And once you start doing that, you've just quashed THE advantage tape had over disk. LTO doesn't provide any more reliability, it just shifts the failure points around. Instead of 20 year old sealed hard drives with bearings that will seize up and render your data unreadable, it'll be perfectly stable 20 year old tapes that no drive in the world can read. I'm also skeptical of the cost savings from cheap media once periodic remigrations are priced in, but it might still win out over disk for absolutely enormous libraries (e.g. entire Hollywood studio productions). And no, there isn't some other tape format that has better long-term support. Oracle stopped upgrading T10000 around 2017, and IBM 3592 has an even worse backwards compatibility story than LTO. [0] LTO-8 drives only have 1 generation of backwards compatibility because TMR heads get trashed by metal particulate tapes
- ars 2y ago
  Store some drives (readers) with the tapes, include an IDE (or whatever it is) to USB adapter if you are worried.