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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 ab
by 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 agoThey are already paying another company to warehouse the drives; surely that company could offer to rent LTO drives going back several generations?
- nxobject 2y agoAs 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 agoYeah, 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 agoOlder generations of LTO are economical if your storage requirements are modest.