2 ms·

Tapes are fun. You can fit a petabyte of data in a bankers box! The problem quickly becomes: - Do we have a drive that can read this tape? - Do we have serve

Tapes are fun. You can fit a petabyte of data in a bankers box! The problem quickly becomes: - Do we have a drive that can read this tape? - Do we have server we can connect it to? - Do we have storage we can extract it to? (go ask your internal IT team for 10TB of drivespace...) - What program did we create this tape with? Backup Exec, Veritas, ArcServe, SureStore - You have the encryption keys, right? - How much of this data already exists on the previous months backup? - Who's going to pay for the storage to move it to Glacier/etc? -How long is it going to take to upload?

aftbit 2y ago
If you are having trouble getting 10TB of disk space from IT, you have bad IT. Not saying that's uncommon or anything, but 10TB fits on one external hard drive for $300 from Best Buy, or less than $1000/mo using EBS on AWS if you need some better guarantees and are all-in on the cloud.
DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
> Tapes are fun. You can fit a petabyte of data in a bankers box! Yes, though those ultra-thin M.2 NVMe drives could probably top that now. > Do we have a drive that can read this tape? Don't let this be a problem in the first place: buy 4 tape drives and keep 2 of them in your cold/offsite/airgapped storage site (2 in case 1 fails, so you can use the remaining drive to transfer everything to a newer format). > Do we have server we can connect it to? Significant hardware should not (and is not) necessary: the LTO-7/8/9 drives I see for sale right now seem to be using either USB 3.0, Thunderbolt, or SAS connections; USB and Thunderbolt can be handled by any computer you can find at a PC recycler today; while any old desktop can handle SAS with a $80 HBA card. > Do we have storage we can extract it to? (go ask your internal IT team for 10TB of drivespace...) 10TB isn't a good example (case-in-point: I have a 3-year-old stack of unused 12TB WD drives less than 3 feet away from me). That said, if you're enterprise-y enough for a $4000 LTO-9 drive, then you probably also have a SAN that's chock full of drives, so being able to provision a 10TB+ LUN should be implicit. > What program did we create this tape with? Backup Exec, Veritas, ArcServe, SureStore Ideally, none of those; instead, good ol' Perl and `dd`. > You have the encryption keys, right? I don't encrypt my backups to avoid this problem. My old data archives have little exploitable value for any potential attacker; and I imagine I'd store backup tapes this important in a fireproof safe in my parents' house or something. I'd only encrypt the entire tape if the tape were to leave my custody. I appreciate that this is not for everyone, and it's probably illegal for some people/orgs to not encrypt backups too anyway (HIPAA, etc). > How much of this data already exists on the previous months backup? Incremental/Differential backups are still a thing. > Who's going to pay for the storage to move it to Glacier/etc? No-one should. Cold data backups should/must always be in the custody of a designated responsible officer of the company. BUUUT, I guess there's nothing wrong with storing an encrypted copy in Cloud storage (as in S3/Glacier/AzureBlobs - not OneDrive...). I actually do this right now thanks to the smooth and painless integration in my Synology NAS. It costs me about $15/mo to store all these TBs in S3. > How long is it going to take to upload? Consider that it's 2024 - a company with LTO-9 and SAN is probably going to have a metro-ethernet IP connection at 10Gbps or even faster. At home I have a 10Gbps symmetric connection from Ziply (it's $300/mo and they give you an SFP module, which I put into my Ubiquiti UDM): so the limiting factor here is not my upload speed, but my drive read speed (LTO-9 drives seem to read at about 2-3Gbps raw/uncompressed?)

aftbit 2y ago

If you are having trouble getting 10TB of disk space from IT, you have bad IT. Not saying that's uncommon or anything, but 10TB fits on one external hard drive for $300 from Best Buy, or less than $1000/mo using EBS on AWS if you need some better guarantees and are all-in on the cloud.

DaiPlusPlus 2y ago

> Tapes are fun. You can fit a petabyte of data in a bankers box! Yes, though those ultra-thin M.2 NVMe drives could probably top that now. > Do we have a drive that can read this tape? Don't let this be a problem in the first place: buy 4 tape drives and keep 2 of them in your cold/offsite/airgapped storage site (2 in case 1 fails, so you can use the remaining drive to transfer everything to a newer format). > Do we have server we can connect it to? Significant hardware should not (and is not) necessary: the LTO-7/8/9 drives I see for sale right now seem to be using either USB 3.0, Thunderbolt, or SAS connections; USB and Thunderbolt can be handled by any computer you can find at a PC recycler today; while any old desktop can handle SAS with a $80 HBA card. > Do we have storage we can extract it to? (go ask your internal IT team for 10TB of drivespace...) 10TB isn't a good example (case-in-point: I have a 3-year-old stack of unused 12TB WD drives less than 3 feet away from me). That said, if you're enterprise-y enough for a $4000 LTO-9 drive, then you probably also have a SAN that's chock full of drives, so being able to provision a 10TB+ LUN should be implicit. > What program did we create this tape with? Backup Exec, Veritas, ArcServe, SureStore Ideally, none of those; instead, good ol' Perl and `dd`. > You have the encryption keys, right? I don't encrypt my backups to avoid this problem. My old data archives have little exploitable value for any potential attacker; and I imagine I'd store backup tapes this important in a fireproof safe in my parents' house or something. I'd only encrypt the entire tape if the tape were to leave my custody. I appreciate that this is not for everyone, and it's probably illegal for some people/orgs to not encrypt backups too anyway (HIPAA, etc). > How much of this data already exists on the previous months backup? Incremental/Differential backups are still a thing. > Who's going to pay for the storage to move it to Glacier/etc? No-one should. Cold data backups should/must always be in the custody of a designated responsible officer of the company. BUUUT, I guess there's nothing wrong with storing an encrypted copy in Cloud storage (as in S3/Glacier/AzureBlobs - not OneDrive...). I actually do this right now thanks to the smooth and painless integration in my Synology NAS. It costs me about $15/mo to store all these TBs in S3. > How long is it going to take to upload? Consider that it's 2024 - a company with LTO-9 and SAN is probably going to have a metro-ethernet IP connection at 10Gbps or even faster. At home I have a 10Gbps symmetric connection from Ziply (it's $300/mo and they give you an SFP module, which I put into my Ubiquiti UDM): so the limiting factor here is not my upload speed, but my drive read speed (LTO-9 drives seem to read at about 2-3Gbps raw/uncompressed?)