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ELI5: I’ve lost track of tape storage technologies. When does it make sense to use tape backup at home? Most people rely on cloud services or external hard driv

by wslh 2y ago

ELI5: I’ve lost track of tape storage technologies. When does it make sense to use tape backup at home? Most people rely on cloud services or external hard drives for backing up large files like family photos and videos. But is there a point—like a certain amount of data—where it becomes convenient to use tape instead? On the surface, this might seem like a simple question, but let me elaborate with an example: think about storing unavailable movies on high-quality 2K/4K/8K content. Would tape backup be a good fit for this kind of use at home?

evoke4908 2y ago
The tape market is highly price-fixed and innovation-restricted. Intel has more or less of a total monopoly in this space. It's essentially LTO or go home. Your one and only option is enterprise grade hardware at enterprise prices. Even on eBay, prices are well beyond what I'd consider consumer-accessible. Your best bet is to piece together a fiber channel system and hope you get lucky on a cheap used drive. IBM is wholly uninterested in selling tape to consumers, so you aren't going to have a good time trying to use it anyway.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  >The tape market is highly price-fixed and innovation-restricted. Intel has more or less of a total monopoly in this space. Huh? How so? Intel doesn't make tape drives, and never has. IIRC, there are 4 companies making tape drives, including Quantum and HPE.
wtallis 2y ago
The main problem with tape storage at small scales (including home use) has always been that tape drives are relatively expensive (several thousand dollars new), and buying just one makes it a single point of failure for your backup system. If your data set can fit on one or two dozen hard drives, then hard drives are the cheaper option (unless you keep them powered up and spinning 24/7).
ghostly_s 2y ago
> When does it make sense to use tape backup at home? Never. Tape only makes sense for true cold storage-ie. business-critical backups that are only going to be read back in case of emergency, where a couple days to retrieve the data is an acceptable compromise. "Movies I don't watch very often" are not 'cold' enough- it's just not worth the hassle of switching tapes and maintaining the entirely different infrastructure for even finding the right tape and reading the data. And while the price of the media is attractive, even second hand drives are prohibitively expensive and packed with moving parts to break down. If you really have a use case for offline backups at home BD-R is much more accessible (and I did look into this recently for the same use-case; unfortunately optical disk robots are still out of the reach of enthusiasts too. Could be a cool DIY project though...)
dekhn 2y ago
Throughout my career, folks have asked me to look at tape for a wide range of uses, and even after investing a bunch of time and money, my conclusion is: few users need tape. For the vast majority of users, hard drives represent the pinnacle of tradeoffs in capacity, performance, and long-term reliability.
knowitnone 2y ago
tape storage would be perfect for storing movies. There is not much random access and it's cheap. Also need it to last 100 years would be a good selling point. DVDs work but they do fail over time. Still waiting for that holographic or DNA storage.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  If you need to store the entire Netflix catalog, then yes, tape would be the way to go here. If you're just storing your own personal collection, then definitely not. It's much cheaper to just buy or build a NAS with some large HDDs and store your entire library there, plus you can have immediate access to it any time with Jellyfin or Plex. The problem with tapes is that the tapes themselves aren't that cheap, and the drives are prohibitively expensive and require an HBA card (even more money). On top of that, enterprise software for tape management is horrifically expensive (and you probably can't buy it anyway as an individual), or you have to manage them manually at the command line with `tar > /dev/tape`. Even worse, if your tape drive dies (it is a complex mechanical item with lots of moving parts after all), then to read your tape library, you can't just go buy a new one, you have to get one of the same or similar generation as the tapes: an LTO-7 drive can't read a LTO-4 tape, for instance. At least DVDs are a fixed format that hasn't changed in decades, and getting a drive to read them is easy (and BluRay drives can read them too). DNA makes no sense for storage: it isn't even very good for storing our own genome, and needs complicated mechanisms to ensure integrity, and even then frequently fails, resulting in mutations (which is how evolution works). What we need is glass-based holographic storage. There is some commercial work here that I think Microsoft is involved in, but it seems to not be moving very quickly.

by wslh 2y ago

evoke4908 2y ago

The tape market is highly price-fixed and innovation-restricted. Intel has more or less of a total monopoly in this space. It's essentially LTO or go home. Your one and only option is enterprise grade hardware at enterprise prices. Even on eBay, prices are well beyond what I'd consider consumer-accessible. Your best bet is to piece together a fiber channel system and hope you get lucky on a cheap used drive. IBM is wholly uninterested in selling tape to consumers, so you aren't going to have a good time trying to use it anyway.

shiroiushi 2y ago
>The tape market is highly price-fixed and innovation-restricted. Intel has more or less of a total monopoly in this space. Huh? How so? Intel doesn't make tape drives, and never has. IIRC, there are 4 companies making tape drives, including Quantum and HPE.

wtallis 2y ago

The main problem with tape storage at small scales (including home use) has always been that tape drives are relatively expensive (several thousand dollars new), and buying just one makes it a single point of failure for your backup system. If your data set can fit on one or two dozen hard drives, then hard drives are the cheaper option (unless you keep them powered up and spinning 24/7).

ghostly_s 2y ago

> When does it make sense to use tape backup at home? Never. Tape only makes sense for true cold storage-ie. business-critical backups that are only going to be read back in case of emergency, where a couple days to retrieve the data is an acceptable compromise. "Movies I don't watch very often" are not 'cold' enough- it's just not worth the hassle of switching tapes and maintaining the entirely different infrastructure for even finding the right tape and reading the data. And while the price of the media is attractive, even second hand drives are prohibitively expensive and packed with moving parts to break down. If you really have a use case for offline backups at home BD-R is much more accessible (and I did look into this recently for the same use-case; unfortunately optical disk robots are still out of the reach of enthusiasts too. Could be a cool DIY project though...)

dekhn 2y ago

Throughout my career, folks have asked me to look at tape for a wide range of uses, and even after investing a bunch of time and money, my conclusion is: few users need tape. For the vast majority of users, hard drives represent the pinnacle of tradeoffs in capacity, performance, and long-term reliability.

knowitnone 2y ago

tape storage would be perfect for storing movies. There is not much random access and it's cheap. Also need it to last 100 years would be a good selling point. DVDs work but they do fail over time. Still waiting for that holographic or DNA storage.

shiroiushi 2y ago
If you need to store the entire Netflix catalog, then yes, tape would be the way to go here. If you're just storing your own personal collection, then definitely not. It's much cheaper to just buy or build a NAS with some large HDDs and store your entire library there, plus you can have immediate access to it any time with Jellyfin or Plex. The problem with tapes is that the tapes themselves aren't that cheap, and the drives are prohibitively expensive and require an HBA card (even more money). On top of that, enterprise software for tape management is horrifically expensive (and you probably can't buy it anyway as an individual), or you have to manage them manually at the command line with `tar > /dev/tape`. Even worse, if your tape drive dies (it is a complex mechanical item with lots of moving parts after all), then to read your tape library, you can't just go buy a new one, you have to get one of the same or similar generation as the tapes: an LTO-7 drive can't read a LTO-4 tape, for instance. At least DVDs are a fixed format that hasn't changed in decades, and getting a drive to read them is easy (and BluRay drives can read them too). DNA makes no sense for storage: it isn't even very good for storing our own genome, and needs complicated mechanisms to ensure integrity, and even then frequently fails, resulting in mutations (which is how evolution works). What we need is glass-based holographic storage. There is some commercial work here that I think Microsoft is involved in, but it seems to not be moving very quickly.